
Class 
Book- 






PREFACE. 



These letters from Kansas, New Mexico, Arizona and 
Old Mexico were written for publication in the Daily 
Champion, of Atchison, Kansas. They do not tell all there 
is to tell about the Great Southwest, but so far as they go 
they are accurate; and their style, or lack of style, will 
perhaps be quite as agreeable to the average reader as 
something more pretentious. N. L. P. 



LETTERS 



In Which We Start 5 

A Day with the Mennonites 11 

Odds and Ends of Kansas 21 

A Letter on Agriculture 26 

Mountains and Mexicans 33 

The New-Mexican Kevolution 40 

From Las Vegas to Santa Fe 46 

Hours in Santa Fe 54 

Something More About Santa Fe 60 

Albuquerque and Its Neighborhood 68 

Socorro 75 

A Glimpse of Mexico 82 

Something About Chihuahua 89 

Eecollections of Chihuahua 95 

Some Further Journeyings 103 

Mexico and Kailroads Ill 

Out on the Atlantic & Pacific 117 

Homeward Bound , 126 



South-Wester^ Lehers." 



By 



Noble L. Prentis. 



> » • «• 



TOPEKA, KANSAS: 

KANSAS PUBLISHING HOUSE. 

188 2. 









A 









SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS 



IN WHICH WE START. 



Going from Atchison to Topeka, your correspondent had as a 
traveling companion an old acquaintance, who had just passed 
through the experience of Americans who can afford it, of 
" hunting a climate." After living in Kansas for many years, 
he had become possessed with an idea that he would improve his 
atmosphere, and had gone to what many people suppose that 
earthly paradise, Southern California. Greatly to his surprise, 
the tropical clime, "the land of the orange and palm," the myrtle 
and the rest of the botanical resources you will find described in 
Moore's poetry, turned up, so to speak, with a two-hours' snow 
storm, and the human race in that part of the country was 
threatened with extinction by freezing. This meteorological sur- 
prise party was followed by raw and cloudy skies and hyperborean 
treatment generally, until our Kansas friend was fain to return 
to his former habitation. But not being ready to settle down, 
he took a supplementary journey to Central Iowa, from whence 
he was returning when this narrative begins. In Iowa he had 
been greeted with the rawest and "soakingest" of rains, sulky 
clouds, and that terror of the Kansas soul, mud. He was an 
elderly man, and not much given to demonstrativeness, but it 
was as good as a play to hear his heartfelt ejaculation as he 
looked out of the car window: "Well, this is good." It was a 
perfect spring day in Kansas; and all the world "lying and be- 
ing situate" between Atchison and Topeka looked as if God had 
made it the day before. So we ran along the level to Parnell, 
and climbed the long slope to Nortonville, and looked out at the 



6 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

lovely country stretching away for miles around that little town, 
all bathed in the sunshine, and then went clattering down the 
divide into the valley of the Delaware, (as the sensitive people of 
those parts call it, though Grasshopper will always be good 
enough for me,) and looked over the springing wheat fields, 
brighter than emerald, and then took the long ascent where the 
railroad crosses the sharp divide at Rock Creek station, and then 
we rushed through the cuts to Meriden, and then down again, all 
the way down, for ten miles, until the train dashes out of the 
woods into the wide valley of the Kaw, and the roofs and spires 
of Topeka rise in the near distance. And the sun shone all the 
way, and our traveled friend talked all the fifty miles about the 
State, and said every field of wheat looked bright, from Atchison 
to Dodge City, and that he would not give Kansas for a seat 
astride of the equator; and "all the justices concurred." 

There seems to be no doubt that, according to usage, precedent 
and the fitness of things, a State capital ought to be a sleepy, 
shady town, with brick sidewalks, and with no excitement save 
the annual or biennial meeting of the Legislature, when it ought 
to be all torn up and flustrated, like an old woman with the chim- 
ney on fire. But Topeka is undeniably experiencing a genuine 
boom. A great multitude of new houses are being built, and 
real estate is ballooning. A weedy, unkempt farm, just outside 
the city, which a few years ago the owner seemed to think was 
unworthy of cultivation, is now valued at one thousand dollars 
an acre. The citizens who formerly lived and transacted their 
affairs, including weather predictions and the political manage- 
ment of the State and Nation, on the sunny side of Kansas avenue, 
have become capitalists ; try to look as if they lived in Boston ; 
are interested in the Colorado mines, the water works, or the 
electric light; are accused of being financially implicated in 
morning newspapers; and have each erected a residence in one 
of the many styles prevalent, from that of the Babylonish cap- 
tivity to the death of Queen Elizabeth. Public improvements 
are going on; the street cars, long needed, are running; water 
pipes are being laid down on the street; the excavation for the 
main building of the capitol has begun, and the capitol square is 



IN WHICH WE START. 7 

again in the state of chronic disorder which has characterized it 
ever since it had an existence; a huge pile of rough rock indicates 
the site of the public library building in the square; and stranger 
than all, a close observer can see that day by day there is a 
change in the massive outlines of the United States building on 
the avenue. Whatever report you may hear to the contrary, 
they are at work upon it. 

The question must arise, alike in the minds of the resident and 
the stranger, why should this city, with no wholesale business to 
speak of; until recently, very little private wealth ; no manufac- 
tures ; situated in the midst of a farming country which is, to say 
the least, no richer or more populous than that which surrounds 
every other Kansas town twenty-five years old, grow as this city 
has done within the last three years, until there is little doubt 
that it is the first city in population in the State? Some may say 
that it is the location here of the seat of government for the State, 
and several State institutions, but that fact has never made a 
flourishing city elsewhere. As a rule, it would be hard to find a 
duller lot of towns than the capitals of the various States of the 
Union. The sale of hash to a Legislature is at best a fleeting 
resource; while State institutions, as a rule, purchase their sup- 
plies by contract at commercial centers, and do little for the 
sleepy burgs in which they are located. In the case of Topeka 
there is but one answer to the problem of prosperity — the estab- 
lishment here of the headquarters of the Atchison, Topeka & 
Santa Fe Railroad Company. 

It is very curious to look back as I can, twelve years, and note 
the railroad situation here. The great road then was the Kansas 
Pacific. It ran, to be sure, on the wrong side of the river, but it 
began and ended somewhere, and was the only thoroughfare to 
the East and the West. The K. P. was a big thing then. It 
did nothing, however, for the town, except that the National Land 
Company, a sort of wheel within a wheel, a private association 
which sold Kansas Pacific lands, had its headquarters here, at- 
tracting a good many land buyers, and advertising the " far West," 
which was then located in the vicinity of Salina. But the Na- 
tional Land Company went up; I do not know what became of 



8 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

its constituent members. One of them, Dr. Webb, gave the world 
a Kansas book, "Buffalo Land," but I have not seen either author 
or book in a long time. In those days when the " K. P." was 
booming, the Santa Fe was a miserable little road, beginning, as 
I knew it first, at Topeka, and ending at Burlingame, a town 
which was encouraged by its railroad prospects to issue bonds for 
a woolen mill, which has never yet robbed a flock of its fleece. 
There was one little old engine, and the " machine shop" con- 
sisted mostly of an anvil. The depot, however, was quite as 
commodious as that of the Kansas Pacific, which really had use 
for one, which was doubtful in the case of the Santa Fe. The 
financial management of the road required little attention. The 
road finally reached the Osage county coal fields, and I have 
heard Mr. Sargent, then general freight agent, say that in the 
early days, by stepping to the door of his residence and counting 
the cars brought in by the solitary daily coal train, he could tell 
the exact receipts of the corporation. This was the situation in 
1870. 

Yesterday I visited, for the first time, the Santa Fe shops, 
located here. I found the old bridge shops, originally built by 
the extinct King Bridge Company, a humbug that made a living 
for awhile by securing municipal bonds, building cheap shops, 
and then moving away, or neglecting to make any bridges, had 
been completely transformed. The old shops, considered exten- 
sive when built, served only as a sort of a core for the new shops, 
which stretched away on all sides. I walked all through the 
shops. They were crowded with men and machinery ; every con- 
trivance by which wood can be cut, split, sawed, mortised or 
carved ; or iron hammered, cut, welded, bored, filed, or punched, 
seemed to be at work. Engines are brought from Colorado and 
New Mexico for repairs. I saw the famous "Uncle Dick" on 
the stocks. This enormous locomotive was built for freight 
work on the mountain grades. Her boiler looked as large as 
that of an old-fashioned, high-pressure Mississippi river steam- 
boat. When first sent West, " Uncle Dick " excited great curi- 
osity, but fourteen such monster engines are now at work on the 
road. The one engine, the " C. K. Holliday," which I knew, had 



IN WHICH WE START. \) 

grown to hundreds. I saw No. 315 in the round-house, and I 
was glad to see a fine new engine, the first built in the shops here, 
or in Kansas, bearing the old name, " C. K. Holliday," thus pre- 
serving the fame of the gallant Kansas pioneer, who, with some of 
our own Atchison citizens, conceived the idea of this great road, 
and having "kept the faith," and, we are happy to add, his stock, 
has been rewarded after many days. 

The great fact, however, in connection with this road is, that 
every morning seven hundred men take their places in the shops 
or in the yards. Seven hundred men is a strong regiment of in- 
antry, yet that is the force employed in the work of the shops 
alone. All these men live in Topeka, are paid their money and 
spend it in Topeka. All that portion of the city east of Kansas 
avenue, known in the old time as "the bottom," and ten years 
ago covered by the shanties of the colored people, or lying in 
open, weedy commons, is now covered with the homes of these 
workmen. Each little 25-foot-front lot has its one-story frame 
house, with more ambitious structures here and there. More than 
this, a new town, called Parkdale, has been built on the east side 
of the Shunganunga, inhabited, I should judge, almost exclu- 
sively by workingmen. Each of these men who builds a house 
gives a pledge that he will become a permanent resident, and as 
the discipline in the shops at least is very strict, his permanency 
depends on his being a steady workman. 

Beside the shop hands, an immense number of track-men and 
laborers are employed in the acres on acres of tracks and yards, 
which are constantly being extended. 

I was shown a fine passenger coach and a directors' car of su- 
perior finish, entirely constructed at the works in Topeka, and 
this gives promise of a time when all the cars and coaches of the 
road shall be built here, giving employment to hundreds of hands 
in addition to those now employed. 

I have spoken of one division of the Santa Fe army stationed 
at Topeka, but there is another. One cannot stop at a Topeka 
hotel without noticing the large number of young men at the 
table. These are, almost to a man, employes of the road — clerks 
and the like. Their occupation requires a certain standard of in- 



10 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

telligence and appearance, and the "grinding monopoly" business 
has this advantage, that it tolerates no foolishness. The wild 
young masher finds no bowels of compassion in a corporation, 
and conducts himself, in spiritualistic language, "in harmony 
with the conditions." 

The influence of a great corporation like this in a town like 
Topeka is of course very great. There is more or less " Santa 
Fe" in about everything here. It is unavoidable, and I do not 
know that it is undesirable. At the shops is a whistle, which 
must be a near relative of a fog horn. Its hoarse blast can be 
heard all over Topeka. It is intended to call the workmen, but 
when it blows, all Topeka gets up. All the clocks in town are 
set by that whistle. This is emblematic of the part that the 
"Santa Fe" plays in Topeka affairs. 

I have watched the growth of Topeka and of the Santa Fe for 
a good many years, and it seems to be a good example of sensi- 
ble reciprocity. The city behaved liberally in the first place, 
and has been treated well in return. A pay-roll of $100,000 a 
month is a very comfortable thing to have about a town. The 
executive officers of the road live in Topeka; many of them 
have lived here for years, and have established permanent and 
beautiful homes here, and it is but just to say that they have 
aided every worthy public enterprise, and have heartily co- 
operated with the older citizens in the building-up of the city. 

I have mentioned these facts with a good deal of pleasure. I 
think every Kansan must feel gratification in the thought that 
the Capital of his State is not a dog-fennel haunted village, and 
it is but just that the reason of the Capital city's prosperity 
should be acknowledged. For my part, I can see no reason why 
what has happened in Topeka might not happen elsewhere. The 
spectacle of a great corporation building up a town is rather 
more agreeable than that of a corporation constantly making 
demands of a community, under implied threats, and in return 
for substantial benefits conferred indulging only in vague and 
general promises. I do not believe any corporation or individual 
ever achieved any permanent success by acting the hog, while 
the case of Topeka shows that both a town and a corporation 
may become great gainers by a liberal and generous policy. 



A DAY WITH THE MENNONITES. 



There has always been something very interesting to me in 
the coming of different peoples to Kansas, and the blending of all 
of them into a community of interest and language. In my news- 
paper travels I have interviewed a half-dozen varieties of "colo- 
nists," among them the Hungarians, of Rawlins county, and the 
colored folks of Nicodemus, who came to Kansas from the dis- 
tant and foreign shores of Kentucky. 

By far the most extensive and notable emigration in the history 
of Kansas was that of the so-called " Russians," which began sub- 
stantially in 1874, and which has resulted in the settlement of 
fifteen thousand Mennonites in the counties of Marion, Harvey, 
McPherson, Butler, Reno and Barton, besides the Catholic Ger- 
man-Russians, who have some settlements in Ellis county, -on the 
line of the Kansas Pacific, and whose mud village of Herzog I 
visited in 1878. 

The rallying point of the Russian emigrants in 1874 and 1875 
was Topeka, and that town abounded with sheepskin coats, ample 
breeches, bulbous petticoats, iron teakettles, and other objects 
supposed to be distinctively Russian, for many months. There 
was considerable competition between the two great land-grant 
roads — the Kansas Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa 
Fe — to secure these people as settlers. With its usual good 
luck, the Santa Fe captured both the larger and the better class, 
the Mennonites. 

The Catholic Russians were from a remote part of Russia, the 
government of Saratov, and were the most foreign in their appear- 
ance. The men and boys had a custom of gathering on the street 
at night, near their quarters, and singing in concert. The music 
was of a peculiarly plaintive character, suggesting the wide, lonely 
steppes from whence they came. As I have said, they went out 
on the Kansas Pacific, where they seem to have pretty much dis- 

(11). 



12 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

appeared from public view. In 1878, at Herzog, they had made 
very little progress. 

The Mennonites seemed more at home in this country ; and 
securing excellent lands from the Santa Fe company, soon disap- 
peared from Topeka. In the summer of 1875, in company with 
Mr. C. B. Schmidt, then, as now, the Emigration Agent of the 
A. T. & S. F., who had been largely instrumental in settling 
them in Kansas, I visited a portion of the colonists, living in the 
villages of New Alexanderwohl, Hoffnungsthal and Gnadenau, 
in Harvey and Marion counties. The observations made on the 
occasion of that visit were embodied in an article in the Topeka 
Commonwealth, entitled " The Mennonites at Home." From that 
visit until yesterday, I had never seen the Mennonites, though I 
have often felt a great curiosity to observe for myself how they 
had succeeded. 

In 1875 the Mennonites were still a strange people. They 
retained the little green flaring wagons they had brought from 
Russia, and were attempting to live here under the same rule 
they followed in Russia. The village of Gnadenau was the 
most pretentious of their villages. It was a long row of houses, 
mostly built of sod and thatched with long prairie grass. A few 
of the wealthier citizens had built frame houses, furnished with 
the brick ovens of Russian origin, which warm the family and 
cook its food for all day with two armfuls of loose straw. 

The land belonging in severalty to the villagers, lay around 
the settlement, some of it at a considerable distance, while near at 
hand was a large common field, or rather garden, which was 
principally devoted to watermelons, which seemed the principal 
article on the Mennonite bill of fare. 

The site of the villages seemed selected with care, each stand- 
ing on such slight ridges and elevations as the prairie afforded. 
It was summer in Kansas, and of course the scene was naturally 
beautiful, but the scattered or collected Mennonite houses, with 
their bare walls of sods or boards, amid patches of broken prairie, 
did not at all add to the charm of the scene. The people were 
like their houses, useful but ugly. They had not yet got over the 
effect of their long ocean voyage or their life in the huddled emi- 



A DAY WITH THE MENNONITES. 13 

grant quarters at Topeka, where they acquired a reputation for un- 
cleanliness which they were far from deserving. Still there was 
an appearance of resolution and patience about them, taken with 
the fact that all, men, women, and children, were at work, that 
argued well for the future. It was easy, if possessed of the 
slightest amount of imagination, to see these rude habitations 
transformed in time to the substantial brick houses, surrounded 
by orchards such as the people had owned when they lived on 
the banks of the Molotchna in far Russia. Of course, it was 
reasoned, they would remain villagers ; they would cling to the 
customs they brought from Russia, and remain for generations a 
peculiar people. They would be industrious; they would acquire 
wealth ; but they would remain destitute of any sense of beauty, 
rather sordid, unsocial, and to that extent undesirable settlers. 

Hardly seven years have passed, and on Friday last, for the 
first time, the writer was enabled to carry into effect a long-cher- 
ished purpose to return and take another look at the Mennonites. 
It was intended to start from Newton in the morning, but a day 
fair as ever dawned in Eden was followed by a night of thunder, 
lightniug and rain, the rain continuing to fall all the following 
forenoon, with a chill wind from the north; but at noon one of 
those "transformation scenes" common in Kansas occurred. 
The sky began to clear, with a great baud of blue in the north 
and west; the wind blew free, and by 2 o'clock we drove out over 
roads that you could almost walk in barefooted without soiling 
your feet. We were fortunate in our guide, Mr. Muntefering, of 
Newton, who had hunted all over the country, and had traversed 
it often transacting business on behalf of the railroad company 
with the Mennonites. The wheat waved a varying shade of 
green, shifting in its lines like sea water ; the prairie chickens 
rose on whirring wing before the old hunting dog, who ran before 
the carriage; flocks of long-billed plover looked out of the grass; 
and the meadow lark rehearsed a few notes of his never-finished 
song. 

A great change had taken place in the country generally since 
my last visit. The then raw prairie was now, barring the fences, 
very like Illinois. At last, after driving about ten miles, Mr. Mun- 



14 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

teferiug announced the first Mennonite habitation, in what seemed 
the edge of a young forest, and I then learned what I had never 
before heard, or else had forgotten, that the Mennonites had 
abandoned the village system, and now lived " each man to him- 
self." They tried the villages three years, but some confusion 
arose in regard to paying taxes, and beside, it is in the air, this 
desire for absolute personal and family independence; and so 
they went on their lands, keeping, however, as close together as 
the lay of the country would admit. Sometimes there are four 
houses to the quarter-section; sometimes four to the section. 
The grand divisions of New Alexanderwohl, Hoffnungsthal and 
Gnadenau still exist, but each group of farms has a name of its 
own, revealing a poetical tendency somewhere, as Greenfield, 
Flower Field, Field of Grace, Emma Vale, Vale of Hope, and 
so on. These are the German names freely translated. The old 
sod houses (we believe the Mennonites never resorted to the dug- 
out) had given way to frame houses, sometimes painted white, 
with wooden window shutters. The houses had no porches or 
other architectural adornments, and were uniform in appearance. 
I learned afterward that the houses were built by contract, one 
builder at Halstead erecting sixty-five houses in one neighbor- 
hood. 

The most surprising thing about these places is the growth of 
the trees. I left bare prairie; I returned to find a score of min- 
iature forests in sight from any point of view. The wheat and 
corn fields were unfenced, of course, but several acres around 
every house were set in hedges, orchards, lanes and alleys of trees 
— trees in lines, trees in groups, and trees all alone. In many 
cases the houses were hardly visible from the road, and in a few 
years will be entirely hidden in the cool shade. Where the houses 
were only a few hundred yards apart, as was frequently the case, 
a path ran from one to the other, between two lines of poplars or 
cottonwoods. A very common shrub was imported from Russia 
and called the wild olive, the flowers being very fragrant ; but 
the all-prevailing growth was the mulberry, another Russian idea, 
which is used as a hedge, a fruit tree, for fuel, and as food for the 
silk worm. 



A DAY WITH THE MENNONITES. 15 

We wished to see a few specimen Mennonites and their homes, 
and called first on Jacob Schmidt, who showed us the silkworms 
feeding in his best room. On tables and platforms a layer of* 
mulberry twigs had been laid, and these were covered with thou- 
sands of worms, resembling the maple worm. As fast as the leaves 
are eaten, fresh twigs are added. As the worms grow, more room 
is provided for them, and they finally eat mulberry brush by the 
wagon-load. Mr. Schmidt said the floor of his garret would soon 
be covered. It seemed strange that the gorgeous robes of beauty 
should begin with this blind, crawling green worm, gnawing rav- 
enously at a leaf. 

We went next to the house of Peter Schmidt. Had I been an 
artist I should have sketched Peter Schmidt, of Emmathal, as 
the typical prosperous Mennonite. He was a big man, on the 
shady side of forty. His face, round as the moon, was sunburned 
to a walnut brown. He was very wide fore and aft; he wore a 
vest that buttoned to his throat, a sort of brown blouse, and a 
pair of. very roomy and very short breeches, while his bare feet 
were thrust into a sort of sandals very popular with the Mennon- 
ites. The notable feature of Peter's face was a very small mouth, 
which was slightly spread at times with a little smile, showing 
his white teeth, and quite out of proportion to his immense coun- 
tenance. Peter knew scarcely any English, but conversed readily 
through Mr. Muntefering. He showed with pride his mulberry 
hedges. The plants are set out in three rows, which are cut 
down alternately. Peter had already cut down one row, and had 
a great pile of brush for firewood. The Mennonites relied at first 
on straw, and a mixture of straw and barnyard manure, which 
was dried and used for fuel, but now the wood is increasing on 
their lands. They .have seldom or never indulged in the extrava- 
gance of coal. Another source of pride was the apricots. The 
seed was brought from Russia, and the trees bore plentifully last 
year, and the Mennonites, taking them to Newton as a lunch, 
were agreeably surprised by an offer of $3 a bushel for them. 
Peter Schmidt showed all his arboral treasures — apples, cherries, 
peaches, apricots, pears, all in bearing, where seven years ago the 
wind in passing found only the waving prairie grass. No won- 



16 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

der Peter Schmidt, of Emmathal, waxed fat and smiled. He 
started on the prairie with $800 ; he now has a farm worth $4,000. 
We went into the house, of course; the door of every Mennonite 
is open, and the proprietor showed us his silk worms and his pos- 
sessions generally. He exhibited his Russian oven, built in the 
partition walls so as to warm two or three rooms, and to which 
is attached also a sort of brick range for cooking purposes. This 
device cannot be explained without a diagram. It is perfectly 
efficient, and the smoke at last goes into a wide chimney which 
is used as the family smoke-house. A happy man was Peter 
Schmidt, and well satisfied with his adopted country, for when I 
managed to mix enough German and English together to ask 
him how he liked America as compared with Russia, he an- 
swered in a deep voice, and with his little smile: "Besser." With 
a hearty good-bye to Peter Schmidt of Emmathal, we pursued 
our journey, passing many houses, hedges and orchards, and 
finally came to the home of Heinrich Richert, of Blumenfeld, or 
Flower Field. 

This place was of the more modern type. The house was a 
plain frame, of the American pattern, but the stable had a roof 
of thatch, on which the doves clung and cooed, as you see them 
in pictures. Not far away on either hand were two other houses, 
to which shaded alleys led. In one of them lived the oldest 
married daughter of the family. Leading up to the front door 
the path was lined with hedges of mulberry, trimmed very low, 
and flat on top, as box hedges are trimmed; and there was also 
a large flower bed of intricate pattern, the property of the Misses 
Richert. 

When Mr. Richert came in from the fields, his bright eye, his 
square jaw, and the way he stood on his legs, showed that he was 
accustomed to authority. He had, in fact, been a schoolmaster 
in Russia, and in America occasionally exercises his gifts as a 
preacher. In the sitting-room, which had no carpet, but a pine 
floor which fairly shone, was a book case set in the wall and filled 
with books, which usually are not very common in Mennonite 
houses. They were all sober-colored volumes, commentaries on 
the Scriptures, and works on horse doctoring. Madame Richert, 



A DAY WITH THE MENNONITES. 17 

a very pleasant woman, with, it may be remarked, a very pretty 
and small hand, gave the history of the older books, which were 
brought from Prussia, where her husband was born, but she her- 
self was born in Southern Russia, as were the thirteen young 
Richerts. 

It was decided to accept the hospitality of these good people, 
and the mother and daughters got supper — and such a supper! 
such bread and butter and preserves; and everything, nearly, on 
the bill of fare was the product of this six-year-old farm. At 
table the conversation turned on the mode of living in Russia. 
From Mr. Richert's description the Mennonites lived much bet- 
ter than most working people in Europe. They had Brazilian 
coffee which came by way of Hamburg, and tea which came 
overland from China; then they had fish, both fresh-water fish 
and fish from the Sea of Azof. He said the mode of serving 
food had been changed somewhat since the Mennonites had mi- 
grated to this country. 

After supper, Mr. Richert, his sou, and the visitors, had a long 
talk about Russia. The treatment accorded the Mennonites by 
the Russian government, up to 1871, was all that could be de- 
sired. The agreements made in the days of the Empress Cath- 
erine, what Mr. Richert called the "privilegiurn," were faith- 
fully kept. The Mennonites did not own the lands, but leased 
them on the condition of cultivating them; the improvements 
were their own. The Mennonites had, in fact, very little to do 
with the Imperial government; each of the fifty villages had its 
burgomaster, and a chief burgomaster was elected by the people. 
The Government transacted its business with the Mennonites 
through a council consisting of three Russian officials, and these 
performed their duty honestly — a rare thing in Russia. The 
Mennonites were industrious, peaceable and loyal; a Mennonite 
was the richest man in the Crimea, and one of the wealthiest in 
Russia. Everything went well until the Government, in 1871, 
announced its intention of enforcing a universal conscription. 
Against .this the Mennonites protested. Ten years was given 
them to yield or leave. Thousands left. In 1881 the Govern- 
ment revoked the "privilegiurn," compelled the remaining Men- 



18 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

nonites to take lands in severalty, and began to introduce the 
Russian language into the Mennonite schools. Russia's loss is 
our gain. 

At breakfast the conversation turned on the wonderful success 
of the Mennonites with all kinds of trees, quite excelling any- 
thing known by Americans, with all their low-spirited horticul- 
tural societies. Herr Richert remarked that one thing that 
helped the trees was " plowing the dew under." This is one of 
the secrets of Mennonite success — they "plow the dew under" 
in the morning, and do not stop plowing till the dew falls at even- 
ing. 

The history of Herr Richert was that of all the Mennonites 
we talked with. He had come to this country with $1,000 ; at 
the end of the second year he was $1,300 in debt, but had lifted 
the load and was now the possessor of a fine farm. The Men- 
nonites, we may say, bought their lands in alternate sections of 
the railroad company, and in most cases bought the intervening 
sections of individual owners. They have been prompt pay. 
Many of the Mennonites were very poor. To provide these with 
land, a large sum was borrowed from wealthy Mennonites in the 
East. The beneficiaries are now prosperous, and the money has 
been faithfully repaid. Besides this, a mission has been main- 
tained in the Indian Territory, and a considerable sum has been 
recently forwarded to aid destitute brethren in Russia. 

To continue our journey: our next stop was to call on a settler 
who wore a beard, a Cossack cap, and looked the Russian more 
than any other man we met. He took us into a room to show 
us some Tartar lamb-skin coats, which was a perfect copy of a 
room in Russia; with its sanded floor, its wooden settees painted 
red and green, its huge carved chest studded with great brass- 
headed bolts, and its brass lock-plate, all scoured to perfect 
brightness. In a little cupboard was a shining store of brass 
and silver table ware. It was like a visit to Molotchna. 

At the humble dwelling of Johann Krause we witnessed the 
process of reeling raw silk. The work was done by Mrs. Krause, 
on a rude twister and reel of home construction. The cocoons 
were placed in a trough of boiling water, and the woman, with 



A DAY WITH THE MENNONITES. 19 

great dexterity, caught up the threads of light cocoons, twisting 
them into two threads and running these on the reel. The work 
required infinite patience, of which few Americans are possessed. 
The Mennonites carried on the silk-raising business in Kussia 
with great success, and bid fair to make it a great interest here. 

After leaving Johann Krause, we made few more halts, but 
drove for miles with many Mennonite houses in sight, and the 
most promising orchards and immense fields of the greenest 
wheat. I have never seen elsewhere such a picture of agricul- 
tural-prosperity. 

If anyone has not yet made up his mind as to the possibilities 
of Kansas agriculture, I recommend a visit to the Mennonite set- 
tlements. It is not difficult of accomplishment, as the points I 
visited in Harvey, McPherson and Marion counties can be reached 
by a few miles drive from Newton or Halstead, on the main line 
of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, or from Canton, Hillsboro 
and other stations on the Marion & McPherson branch. 

It is a matter, I regret to say, of uncertainty whether the work 
begun by these Mennonite settlers will be completed. If the sons 
and grandsons of Peter Schmiclt of Emmathal and Heinrich 
Richert of Blumenfeld will walk in the ways of these worthy 
men, the result will be something like fairy-land — the fairies 
being, however, substantial men, weighing about 185 pounds each. 
The orchards will bud and bloom, and amid them will stand the 
solid brick houses, like those of Russia, and the richest farmers 
of Kansas will dwell therein. But there is a danger that this 
will not come to pass. Jacob and David will go to work on the 
railroad, and let the plow take care of itself; and Susanna and 
Aganetha will go out to service in the towns, and fall to wearing 
fine clothes and marrying American Gentiles; and the evil day 
may come when the descendant of the Mennonites of the old 
stock will be cushioning store-boxes, saving the Nation with his 
mouth, or even going about like a roaring lion seeking a nomi- 
nation for Congress. I wish I could believe it otherwise. I wish 
our atmosphere did not make us all so smart that we cannot en- 
joy good health. Were it not for that accursed vanity and rest- 
lessness which is our heritage, I could indulge in a vision of the 



20 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

future — of a peaceful, quiet, wealthy people, undisturbed by the 
throes of speculation or politics, dwelling in great content under 
the vines and mulberry trees which their fathers planted in the 
grassy, wind-swept wilderness. 



ODDS AND ENDS OF KANSAS. 



A gentleman who had traveled in Egypt once told me that, 
so rank is the vegetation in that country, a picketed camel graz- 
ing in a circle cannot keep up with the growth of the grass ; that 
is to say, when he returns to the point in the circle where he 
began, he finds the grass higher than he found it at first. I find 
that something of the kind occurs in this country. The traveler 
or correspondent who fails to visit a portion of Kansas for two 
or three years discovers that the country has outgrown him. In 
the four years that have elapsed since I visited the southwest, 
although I have read the local papers every day since, I have 
not kept in my mind a clear conception of the march of progress. 
For instance, there is a new system of railroads and a whole 
batch of new railroad towns. Beginning at Emporia, there was 
no "Howard Branch;" only an unfinished road which was ex- 
pected to end at Eureka; no Marion & McPherson Branch turned 
off at Florence ; the Wichita Branch ended at that place, and 
Winfield and Arkansas City were railroad towns only in expect- 
ancy. Caldwell, now one of the famous towns in the State, I 
knew as a remote hamlet, its recollection preserved only by a 
story that an unfortunate stranger wearing a silk hat, venturing 
into its precincts, had been murdered by a ruffian who, saying 
he would knock the hat off, shot the poor fellow through the 
head. 

At Wichita I found everybody talking of the "Frisco" road 
as if it had always been in existence, yet my last recollection of 
it was as a bob-tailed affair, as far as Kansas was concerned, 
running from Oswego to Columbus, and so east. Now, passen- 
gers from St. Louis pass through Fredonia, Neodesha, and so on, 
to Wichita ; then up the Santa Fe Branch to Sedgwick City ; 
then by a recently constructed cut-off to Halstead, and then 
by the Atchison main line to the Pacific. 
2 (21) 



22 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

The Atchison road itself, of which the roads mentioned are all 
branches or connections, has in these four years entered the field 
as an actual Pacific railroad, competing for the trans-continental 
business, and has been "armed and equipped," running enormous 
passenger trains; and in the Marion & McPherson Branch pos- 
sessing what amounts to a double track for a long distance. A 
complete line of fine eating stations has been put in operation, 
the Superintendent of Kitchens being Mr. Phillips, formerly of 
the Sherman House, Chicago, where his salary was $2,500 a year. 
Beginning at Atchison, the eating stations are Topeka, Florence, 
Coolidge, La Junta, Raton, Las Vegas, Wallace, Hot Springs, 
Deming and Lamy. To these will be added, in a day or two, New- 
ton, with a fine railroad hotel. This will divide the business with 
Florence, now the most important of the stations, as two branches, 
the Marion & McPherson and the old Eldorado Branch, there 
connect with the main line. We were accustomed to speak, 
years ago, of Kansas as "gridironed with railroads," but a mul- 
tiplicity of new bars have been added within the last two years, 
not to speak of four. 

The most unchangeable-looking country so far familiar to me 
on what may be termed the old Santa Fe, is that between Topeka 
and Emporia. The scenery consists, as aforetime, of coal shafts 
and wood-built mining towns, and side-tracks full of coal cars; 
and yet Kansas cannot be made to look anywhere like a genuine 
mining country. There are no sooty hills, and the sky is too vast 
for pollution by smoke. Kansas will never look like Pennsyl- 
vania, nor ever possess a Pittsburg. It is one of her many good 
points to be the tenth coal-producing State of the Union, without 
being begrimed. In the Osage coal country, pick and plow do 
not seem to work w r ell together, but great herds of cattle are graz- 
ing a few feet above the coal beds; and I saw in Cherokee county 
once a fine wheat field, white for the harvest, and the miners were 
digging the coal from under it. 

Passing Emporia, the gradual agricultural transformation of 
the Cottonwood valley is seen; but the first remarkable change 
in the surface of the earth is at what was once called Cottonwood 
Falls station, now Strong City. The quarries here, from whence 



ODDS AND ENDS OF KANSAS. 23 

came the stone for the great bridge at Atchison, have been devel- 
oped enormously, and a smart little town has grown up around 
them. Coal, cattle, wheat and stone form a striking combination 
of products along one line of railroad. 

At Newton, as one sees it now, it is hard for a stranger to be- 
lieve that a place named in honor of a staid and godly Massa- 
chusetts village presented, for the first season of its existence, 
the "fittest earthly type of hell." I saw it once during that sum- 
mer, sweltering in its sinful ugliness in the noonday sun, a fes- 
tering ulcer on the face of earth. One street — the present Main 
street — was lined with an irregular array of hastily-constructed 
shanties — gambling-rooms, drink-mills and the like — while, as 
if scorned even by these places, in a suburb stood the dance 
houses, long, low, unpainted, and excelled in hideousness only by 
the wretched, bloated, painted, blear-eyed women who dwelt there, 
and the bow-legged, low-browed, Indian-like cow boys who con- 
sorted with them. These creatures finally seemed to grow wild, 
and went to killing each other. According to tradition, eight 
corpses were the result of one night's fusillade. These events 
had at that time a graphic local historian. He combined the 
functions of a man of letters and a musician in a dance house. 
It was literally a case of " all that he saw, and part of which he 
was." What fate induced or seduced a man of his intelligence 
to herd with the scum of the earth, and form part of it, I never 
knew; nor do I know what finally became of the writer who se- 
lected for himself, amid such surroundings, the pretty nom deplume 
of "Allegro." Newton's wild infancy was not only described 
in prose, but our own Theodore F. Price wrote some wonderful, 
weird verses on the subject — a narrative poem called "Newton, a 
Tale of the Southwest." By the way, the Champion, which keeps 
the record of all the Kansas bards, and has often mentioned Theo- 
dore, can add another paragraph to his story. The "minstrel 
boy" has gone, not to the war, but to far Vancouver. It seems 
to be a cold day for poetry in Kansas. 

The case of Newton and a dozen other towns in Kansas illus- 
trates the final triumph of goodness, or at least respectability. 
Newton is now a fine, growing town, with the usual Kansas com- 



24 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

plement of newspapers, school houses, churches, brick blocks, 
and banks enough to hold all the money of all the editors in 
Kansas, beside a really luxurious and aesthetic jail. White cot- 
tages and gardens now cover and obliterate the old, hard, sun- 
baked cattle trail. And so it is that while nobody ever heard of 
a decent town becoming a nest of land pirates, gamblers and 
ruffians, with the poor women who live with such, Newton, Abi- 
lene and many more have risen above such beginnings. A very 
old book, which possibly I do not quote with accuracy, says that 
the name or memory of the wicked shall rot; and it is even so. 
The evil is transient; it is hunted and fleeting. Go to Abilene 
or Newton now, and you may have pointed out to you, half hid- 
den by other buildings, a battered, wretched wreck of a house, 
the old "Alamo," or "Gold Koom," or some place worse, its rec- 
ollection kept alive by some dark and evil deed ; but even these 
wretched monuments of shame soon disappear. Even the graves 
of those who died in the fierce brawls of the old time are lost. 
Their dust does not repose in the "God's acre" of the modern 
town. It has been often noted that the dangerous classes in large 
cities huddle together in dark places, in narrow streets and lanes 
and courts, but in time a great street or boulevard is driven 
through the doleful place; the sunlight is let in, and the misera- 
ble flit otherwhere. And so it is, even in Kansas. As the view- 
less air and the turbid river purify themselves, so does the moral 
atmosphere. 

At Wichita, on Sunday, I saw more corroboration of the theory 
here advocated. Wichita had its turbulent period, but it seems 
to me that the town grows wider and roomier, and prettier and 
finer, every time I revisit it. A photograph taken a few years 
ago hangs in a gallery showcase. In the picture every house on 
the town site stands up in bare distinction, "all by itself." To- 
day, at the distance of a mile from town, hardly anything can be 
seen save a few high roofs, and the church spires above the bil- 
lowy green. There is one street, Lawrence avenue I believe 
they call it, which seemed to me as fine in its way as Euclid ave- 
nue in Cleveland. Going to the Methodist church, I found that 
new sanctuary a trifle too gorgeous, if there was any fault. I 



ODDS AND ENDS OF KANSAS. 25 

doubt if Bishop Asbury would have liked it. He might have 
thought the I. H. S. in the stained glass windows a "relic of 
Popery." But Bishop Asbury has been dead a long time, and 
ecclesiastical ornamentation is better than "Rowdy Joe" and 
"Red," subjects once more prominent in Wichita life and con- 
versation than church architecture. And, besides, the preacher 
in his prayer gave thanks for the creditable manner in which the 
pupils of the public schools had acquitted themselves at the " ex- 
hibition," which seemed a sensible idea, and smacking of Kan- 
sas withal. 

Notice has often been made of the interest taken in Kansas by 
men and peoples of every variety. At Wichita I learned that the 
slant-eyed and much-whooped-about Mongolian had joined the 
polyglot crowd who are engaged in the making of Kansas. The 
books of the register of deeds for the county of Sedgwick show 
that two eminent Celestials, Chin Lan Pin and Yung Wing, have 
thousands of dollars loaned on real estate in the county, and that 
they stand to quite a number of American citizens in the inter- 
esting relation sustained by a mortgagee. The "Chinee" may 
be a heathen, but his head is spherical when it comes to putting 
his money where it will do the most good. 



A LETTER ON AGRICULTURE. 



The writer of this has long been of the opinion that the extent 
and variety of his ignorance on the subject of farming well-nigh 
qualify him for the editorship of an agricultural journal, but 
has so far resisted the temptation which his misinformation pre- 
sented, to write on the tillage of the soil, except so far as his 
position as a Kansas journalist has obliged him to take part in 
the everlasting "rain-belt" controversy, without which no Kan- 
sas newspaper file is complete. But the hour has come, and your 
correspondent proposes to enter the lists as writer on the first of 
human occupations, promising, meanwhile, to allay the possible 
fears of the readers of the Champion, that this is his last appear- 
ance in that capacity. 

In a former letter, the agricultural and horticultural experi- 
ence of the Mennonites in Marion, McPherson and Harvey 
counties has been mentioned. It did not require an acquaintance 
with the reports of the Secretary of the Kansas State Board of 
Agriculture for the past ten years, more or less, to know that 
the Mennonites had absolutely succeeded. Nearly everything in 
Kansas is going to succeed sometime. It is next spring that 
property is going to be higher. "Ad astra per aspera — after 
awhile," should be the motto of our State. The Mennonites, 
however, have already "made it." Having been an agricultural 
writer but a few minutes, I do not know what the best and most 
learned authorities consider a successful farmer in this western 
country, but I should call that farmer a success who gets out of 
his land a comfortable shelter, plenty to eat, respectable clothing 
for all hands, pleasant surroundings, as far as trees and flowers 
can make such, means to give his children a sensible education, 
and a surplus of money sufficient to buy books and newspapers 
enough to prevent his household from relapsing into ignorance; 
and who, above all, is out of debt. I do not look upon farming 

(26) 



A LETTER ON AGRICULTURE. 27 

as primarily a money-making business, farther than I have indi- 
cated. In this view of the case, the Mennonites have succeeded. 
They have in possession nearly all I have indicated, and could 
have the rest if they wished. They live in a good country, but 
no better than is to be found all over the eastern half of Kansas. 
They have encountered the same seasons, the same grasshoppers, 
the same drouths, the same hot winds, that other settlers have 
contended with, and yet they have remained on their farms while 
thousands of gifted Americans have fled precipitately to the 
East, carrying ^ tale of disaster as they went. While many a 
settler longer in the country lives in a bare, bleak, wind-shaken 
and sun-blistered shanty, with a few desolate, unfenced, dying 
peach trees adding horrors to the scene, the Mennonite dwells in 
the shadow of his mulberries and apricots, and grows fatter every 
day. 

It is true that some of the Mennonites brought considerable 
money with them from Russia, but others brought nothing. It 
seems plain enough, all things considered, that the difference be- 
tween failure and success in Kansas, taking counties like Harvey, 
McPherson and Marion as examples — and there are plenty of 
others as good — lies in the men and women, and not in the soil 
or climate. The patient, toiling Mennonite is doubtless consid- 
ered dull by some of his American neighbors, but he praises 
Kansas, and says she is the best country yet, and stays with her. 

My next "skip" in the collection of this, my first agricultural 
report, was to Larned. That town, I believe, lies in the western 
or third belt. Possibly I am mistaken, but if so the meteoro- 
logical and agricultural savants can correct me. I went to see 
about sorghum. The Champion has always been an advocate of 
Kansas syrup, and its belief in Kansas sugar has rivaled that of 
the late LeDuc himself. It may be said that the "sorghum lap- 
per" has never had a more faithful friend than the Champion ; 
and so, knowing that Mr. John Beunyworth, the pioneer sugar 
manufacturer of Kansas, had invested a good deal of money in 
the neighborhood, a stop at Larned was deemed advisable. In 
company with Col. Ballinger, of the Chronoscope, the sugar fac- 
tory was visited. A closed building was found, filled with silent 



28 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

and costly machinery and a strong smell of sorghum — nothing 
more. Disaster appeared to have attended the enterprise from 
the start. At first the water supply was deficient; then the ma- 
chinery broke, and could not be repaired this side of Cincinnati ; 
then the cane, from frost or some other cause, soured, and would 
not make sugar. Mr. Benny worth demonstrated that sugar could 
be made; but the factory is now closed, and no one appeared to 
know when, if ever, it would be reopened. This looked like the 
failure of a Kansas enterprise, something that it is gall and worm- 
wood for a Kansas man to acknowledge. But Ballinger's flag 
was still there. He called attention to the fact That Mr. Benny- 
worth was still an extensive planter of sorghum cane, and de- 
clared that the cane itself was worth more than all the sugar that 
ever had been or ever would be made. He declared that it was 
the great modern discovery in the way of feed for cattle, sheep, 
and even hogs; that a ton of it — worth $2 — was worth an in- 
definite amount of prairie hay ; and generally, that the path of 
prosperity for Pawnee county lay through a sorghum patch — 
that and broom corn, of which Si 00,000 worth was sold in Paw- 
nee county last season. Cattle, sheep, sorghum cane and broom 
corn was Dr. Ballinger's prescription for Pawnee county. As to 
corn, he thought enough should be planted for the family roast- 
ing ears, and wheat enough to go to mill and keep up appear- 
ances. There was no end to the cattle and sheep business. There 
were 300,000 sheep between Speareville and Larned, in the coun- 
try tributary to the Santa Fe road, and it was just as easy to have 
1,000,000. Rice corn, he said, was a delusion and a snare. 

At the State Fair at Topeka last fall, enormous onions and 
other vegetables were exhibited by the A. T. & S. F. people as 
raised by irrigation at Garden City, Sequoyah county. As the 
place was approached, the stories of the success of the enterprise 
varied. Most were to the effect that a few onions were about all 
the landscape afforded, and a determination once formed to visit 
the place was abandoned. But at five o'clock this morning, as 
the brakeman called "Garden City," this determination was re- 
voked, and a very pleasant and instructive day has been passed 
in consequence. 



A LETTER ON AGRICULTURE. 29* 

The country around Garden City is very large. The world 
never looked larger than from the depot platform this morning. 
A vast plain, as flat as a floor, stretched away to the east, the 
west, the north. On the south flowed the bankless, treeless Ar- 
kansas, reminding one of a human eye without lashes; beyond 
the river was the line of yellow sand-hills. It was very still 
when the train with its rush and roar had come and gone. A 
camp fire glowed off toward the river, and a group of white-cov- 
ered wagons stood near. The sun rose suddenly, as if it came 
up over the edge of the world at the horizon. The little 
town of Garden City, the usual scattered collection of frame 
houses, sod stables, farm wagons, and agricultural implements 
which develop a new settlement in Kansas, had not yet got up to 
breakfast. Four men, with carpet-bags, came out of the east 
somewhere and walked literally up the track to the westward. 
They were going up thousands of feet more into the fastnesses of 
the Rocky Mountains. The place is one of the steps of the 
mountains; this seeming plaitTis really a slope of 3,000 feet above 
the level of the sea. The only genuine mountain I ever climbed 
was hardly as high. Never have I been so impressed with the 
vastness of this western laud. It was almost oppressive. 

A few hours later, I set about looking at the results of the first 
irrigation experiment in Kansas. I had heard that my old ac- 
quaintance, C. J. Jones, had dug a ditch and raised a garden, 
and that was about all. I am frank enough to say that I have 
always heartily despised the name of irrigation and the country 
that resorted to it. Still, everything should be heard in its de- 
fense. 

In company with Mr. I. R. Holmes, I rode over the lands 
where the first ditch was opened, and the ground broken. It 
looked like what it is — a great newly-made garden. It was laid 
out in beds of large size, each with a foot-high ridge around it, 
like the bottom crust of a pie. These are the dykes through 
which the water is let on the beds. Running the length of the 
fields parallel with the river was a ditch with swift-running water 
one or two feet deep; the water ran like a mill-race, and did not 
creep as in a canal. Then there were lateral ditches crossing the 



30 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

fields, a ridge on each side preventing overflow. Men were at 
work watering this bed or that, breaking a hole in the low dyke 
with a spade, and then the water crept, slowly widening, over 
the face of the earth. Some beds were black with recent water- 
ing. I walked about over the little fields. The earth was soft 
like ashes. There is not a stone as big as a baby's foot for miles 
and miles. All sorts of vegetables had been planted ; some grain 
was growing, and there was a field of the curious dark-green al- 
falfa, which sends its roots to water, six, eight, or ten feet, and 
can be cut four or five times a season. 

Everybody was enthusiastic. A man from Greeley, an irriga- 
tion experiment, said that colony was the richest agricultural 
community in the world, and that this was a better location. A 
patch of onions about big enough for an ordinary door-yard was 
said to have yielded $300 worth of onions last year. Mr. Wor- 
rell, who has followed irrigation for thirty-two years in Califor- 
nia, was enthusiastic, and showed cottonwoods fourteen feet high, 
the growth of a single season. 

We traveled out of the bottom to the plateau, to which the 
rise is almost imperceptible. It stretched away, nobody knows, 
I think, how far. It was buffalo grass, sage brush, cactus, soap 
weed; here and there a flock of sheep with an unmoving shep- 
herd; immense, and almost soundless and solitary. A ditch was 
crossed on this high plateau, and all of it can be watered, and 
will be. 

And how many people know what is being done in this out-of- 
the-way place — in this desert — if there is one in Kansas ! Mr. 
Bedell, the surveyor, classified the ditches for me as follows : 

No. 1, owned by Senator Plumb and others, composing the 
Great Eastern Irrigating Company, leaves the river seven miles 
above Lakin, is thirty-four feet wide, is surveyed for twenty-two 
miles, and will water the plateau in Sequoyah and Kearney 
counties. Work has begun, and will be pushed to completion. 

No. 2 leaves the river on the south side, nearly opposite ; owned 
by gentlemen connected with the Santa Fe road, called the Min- 
nehaha Irrigation Company; is twenty-eight feet wide, twenty- 
two miles long, and will water bottom lands on south side of the 
river. 



A LETTER ON AGRICULTURE. 31 

No. 3 leaves the river at Deerfield ; twelve feet wide, fifteen 
miles long; has water running, and will irrigate the plateau north 
of Garden City. 

No. 4, Jones's ditch, leaves the river at Sherlock; waters bot- 
tom around that station. 

No. 5, original ditch, waters bottoms between Garden City and 
the river; is in operation as already described. 

Now read the figures. This system, as completed, can now 
water 60,000 acres; the whole system, as at present devised, will 
be completed within six months, and will water 262,000 acres,' 
which means that land now waste will be made to yield every 
vegetable, fruit and flower known to Kansas. It means that at 
an elevation of 3,000 feet above the sea it is proposed to cultivate 
a great field or garden 262,000 acres in extent. People here, 
who seem to be cool-headed and reasonable, say it will be done. 
They tell me that in a very few short years, at farthest, I will see 
this recent solitude peopled, and that old hackneyed Kansas real- 
estate phrase about the "desert blossoming like the rose," made 
a reality. 

This is a great scheme; one that, in its amplitude, might well 
attract the genius of Colonel Mulberry Sellers ; and yet the gen- 
tlemen interested are the farthest possible removed in character 
from that enthusiastic projector. They are backing their opinion 
with a great deal of money. 

The main ditches, or canals, are excavated with plow and 
scraper, and water is furnished from them at $1 per acre of land 
cultivated during the growing season. Mr. Bedell believes the 
whole Arkansas bottom, as far as Great Bend, 165 miles, can be 
successfully irrigated, though it is doubtful if there are many 
points where as much land can be brought under water as at 
Garden City. 

There is something fascinating in the idea of every man being 
his own rain-maker, and being independent of shifting clouds and 
uncertain winds. The enthusiastic irrigator with a shovel can 
bring on a light or heavy shower, and by lifting a sluice gate 
organize a thunder storm, and he can run all the varieties of 
elemental disturbance at once if he chooses. The " windows of 
Heaven" are nothing to him: he runs the machine himself. 



32 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

My own doubt was, whether the Arkansas would at all stages 
supply the water needed. Mr. Bedell has measured the river 
repeatedly, and says the supply is practically inexhaustible. The 
Arkansas is a two-story river, and if the water in sight were ex- 
hausted, another supply would rise from the river's bed. I have 
heard this sub-irrigation or basement theory disputed, but there 
seems to be no reasonable doubt of its correctness. A hole dug 
in the ground many feet away from the river or from any irriga- 
tion ditch soon begins to fill with water. 

So we have the start of another of the' numerous "big things" 
of Kansas. It has just begun; last year there were 500 acres in 
cultivation; this year 1,200; next year — but it is time to end 
the first lesson in agriculture. 



MOUNTAINS AND MEXICANS. 



The train bound west that reached Garden City on the even- 
ing of Thursday, May 4th, was crowded with people. Where 
they were all going, or why they were going, it would puzzle a 
wise head to answer; but the long train was full. The smoking 
car and the first coaches were filled with Italians, bound to work 
on the railroads in the mountain country; the following day 
coaches and the three sleepers were filled with a mixed multitude 
of men, women and children, destined for a hundred different 
points in the immense country of the Rocky Mountains, and be- 
yond them to the Pacific. Some of the men were going in search 
of health; some to prospect for mines; some to look after invest- 
ments already made; some to buy cattle; and a large number, 
it seemed, without any definite purpose, hoping that in the land 
to which they were going something would turn up; and the 
women and children were going because men had gone or were 
going, since it is the lot of wives and babies in this world to fol- 
low on. 

One reason, I think, why so many people travel now, is because 
they can do so easily and comfortably. Let but the color of 
gold show in mines, or cattle, or town lots, or anything else which 
can be bought or sold, and men will start for it a thousand miles 
on foot; given a wagon road, and hundreds will follow with 
teams; given a railroad, and thousands join the rush. So it is 
that twice every twenty-four hours these great passenger trains 
of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe road fly back and forth 
across the west half of the continent; and between them the 
slower emigrant train, loaded to the last inch. Money and skill 
have so perfected railroad transportation, so increased its speed 
and comfort, that a great army of people cast their eyes on ob- 
jects a thousand miles off, and straightway arise and buy a rail- 
road ticket, rather than stay at home. 

(33) 



34 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

The last object at which a Kansas party, who sat together, 
looked with interest, was the beginning of the great irrigating 
ditch above Lakin, of which mention has been made in a pre- 
vious letter. It wound around in the low lands like a serpent, 
bound in time to carry water, which is life, to thousands of Kan- 
sas acres. 

The next object of interest reached was the railroad eating 
house at Coolidge. The supper here was a marvel. Without a 
butcher, or grocer, or gardener, within hundreds of miles, here 
was an elegant supper, which might be said to have been brought 
from the ends of the earth and set down in the middle of the 
American desert. There is no use for fairy tales any longer. 
They have lost the charming feature of impossibility. All they 
tell happens now every day. The railroad is the magic carpet of 
the old story, which transports the wisher and his supper whither- 
soever he will. 

The long stretch of level plains, lonely and monotonous, was 
traversed in the night. One great State was left, and the bound- 
ary of another long since crossed, when the writer awoke, just at 
what North Carolinians call the "daylight down," to look out of 
the window at a new country. The train was evidently climbing 
a long and steady ascent. The prairie rose in a great yellow 
slope to what looked like an immense line of ruined earthwork ; 
and isolated, stunted trees were scattered about. The sun had not 
fully risen above the horizon, and the pallid full moon was still rid- 
ing high. Suddenly, against the cold gray of the sky, appeared 
what looked like a great amethyst, with streaks of pearly white, 
and below it an enormous sloping mass of dark purple, shading 
away to brown at the base. It was at last, after hundreds of 
level miles, a mountain. One who has never left the plains in 
which he was born can know nothing of the feelings with which 
one whose childish eyes daily looked, at morn and eve, upon the 
solemn splendors of a great mountain, gazes, after months or 
years of absence, once more upon the mountain's eternal face. 
It is the face of an old friend, no matter in what land it may 
greet the sun, or gather round itself the mantle of the storm. 

As the train moved on — now advancing toward the mountain, 



MOUNTAINS AND MEXICANS. 35 

now turning from it — the sun rose, and the great shadows thrown 
by the mountain upon itself shifted from time to time. What 
first seemed a solitary peak, changed to two, with a great gorge 
between them ; and stretching away, like the foaming wake of a 
great ship, was a range of lower mountains, white with snow, as if 
the ice of an arctic sea had suddenly been broken up, and as the 
mighty waves had sprung heavenward, bearing the broken ice- 
floes, they had been frozen again to eternal stillness. The moun- 
tain was the Spanish Peak, and the occasion was a memorable 
one to him who writes of it, since it was his first sight of any por- 
tion of the Rocky Mountains. 

Comparisons were then in order, and many a mountain view 
was recalled, but in vain. The Alps, the White Mountains, the 
Green Mountains, the Alleghanies, the Blue Ridge — none of 
these resemble the Rocky Mountains, save in the fact that they are 
elevations. There is, between all these and the Rocky Mountains, 
this great difference: they are mountains which may be loved; 
which have something human about them; in whose shelter men 
rear their dear homes ; but the Rocky Mountains are not so. They 
are the frown of Nature in some moment of convulsive agony. 
These mountains, seen at earliest morning or at sunset, seem to 
relax somewhat, if I may use the expression, but in the full light 
of day they are always gray, and cold, and stern. 

We were soon amidst scenes as unlike Kansas as possible. 
Mountains rose on both sides. The Raton range appeared in full 
view, with Fisher's Peak and its pulpit-like crowning rock near 
at hand. Foot-hills mingled in confusion; the world seemed left 
half finished; patches of little green, irrigated fields along the 
Purgatoire, and adobe houses, plainly told that we were in a 
semi-Mexican country; and so we came to Trinidad. 

Some people see one thing in a new town; some another. 
Trinidad has, to be described, gas-works, water-works, great out- 
fitting stores, manufactories, banks, and all that goes to make up 
a smart town ; but the writer, having seen and written about all 
that elsewhere, some five hundred times, was more interested in 
matters new to Mm, to wit, Mexicans, adobes and burros. 

The former were very numerous. Trinidad was originally 



36 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

settled in 1860, by New-Mexican people who came up from the 
southward. The Americans have come in and built a modern 
town, and with the latest improvements. But there are six 
thousand Mexicans in the county of Las Animas, and they are 
represented in the government of the county and in the Legisla- 
ture. They are numerous at all hours in the streets of Trinidad ; 
not lounging in the sun as they are usually represented, but 
engaged in various manual avocations. They are not picturesque. 
They wear slouched American hats, instead of sombreros, and 
pants without suspenders, and coats of the ready-made order. 
That garb does not become anybody but the Northern races. In 
coat and pants all the dark people, from the Mexican herdsman 
to the Japanese embassador, are hideous. One secret of the lim- 
ited success of Protestant missionaries in their labors, is their 
insistance that the heathen man must learn English, wear pants, 
and change his name to John P. Smith. So Mexicans, having 
discarded their historical dress in consequence of American asso- 
ciation, are not improved by the operation. 

The Mexican, meaning by that the farmer, herdsman, laborer 
or teamster, is frequently called a "Greaser," and is regarded by 
the Smart Aleck of nationalities, to wit, Mr. Yankee, as a low 
creature. Wishing to hear the counsel for the defense, if any 
existed, the present chronicler made bold to call on one of the 
Padres in Trinidad and ask him his opinion of his flock. It 
may be premised, however, that a pastor always stands up for 
his charge. When some years ago the Chinese question was 
"investigated" in San Francisco, a large number of red-nosed 
policemen swore that a Chinaman could not become a Christian ; 
•but Rev. Mr. Gibson, who has preached to the Chinese for years, 
deposed, like a little man, that the Chinese made an excellent 
article of Presbyterians. It was to be expected that the Padre 
would say a good word, but his testimony was unexpectedly fa- 
vorable. He was an Italian, a short man with a comfortable 
waistband; a large nose, bestrode with spectacles, and spoke 
English in the velvety voice peculiar, I think, to priests, and 
helped his words with the shrug of the shoulders, possible only 
vwith Italians. 



MOUNTAINS AND MEXICANS. 37 

He said, in substance, that newspaper correspondents had been 
altogether too rapid and simultaneous in their judgment of the 
Mexican character. No people could be understood by a stranger, 
ignorant of their language — and the Mexican has been judged by 
such. He is not, as an American is, a man of business. Why 
should he be? Shut out from all the world, with no railroads, 
no markets, why should he raise what he cannot sell? But talk 
to the Mexican about his religion, and you will find that he is a 
theologian. He deserves credit for being what he is. Sur- 
rounded for centuries by Indians, he has preserved his civiliza- 
tion, his religion, and his language. His Spanish is not only 
correct; it is elegant. He is a purist in the matter of language. 
A man should be judged by his heart; and the Mexican is a good- 
hearted man. He is attached to his children, and he is the soul 
of hospitality. Touching the question of blood, and the state- 
ment often made that the Mexican is not a white man, but a 
mongrel Indian, the Padre entered a denial. The common Mexi- 
can is the descendant of the common Spaniard who came with 
Cortez. He had a fashion of adopting Iudian children, whom 
he raised and treated as his own. But these children were mar- 
ried, not to Mexicans, but to other Indians. Possibly illicit 
relations had grown up at times between the races. "For," said 
the Padre, with a deprecatory wave of the hand and the Medi- 
terranean shrug, "we are all but men." But in the matter of 
regular and legitimate descent, the Mexican is no Iudian, nor 
hybrid Indian. Much more said the priest in the same direc 
tion, which I will not set down here, but add that later in the 
day I met Rev. Mr. Darley, who, as a Presbyterian missionary, 
has visited, as he says, every Mexican family in Colorado, and 
who is a thorough Spanish scholar and edits a paper in that lan- 
guage. Mr. Darley confirmed much that his theological enemy 
had stated, especially in regard to the matter of language, though 
he differed in regard to the pedigree question. In short, he gave 
the swarthy adopted American a generally good character. 

I have given these opinions as new, to me at least, and reserve 
my own till a later period. I may add that both clergymen gave 
3 



38 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

me information regarding that curious religious order among the 
Mexicans, the Penitentes, of which I may say more hereafter. 

In regard to adobe structures, which excite the curiosity of 
visitors, I have only to say that an adobe house is a mud house. 
The mud order of architecture varies, but it is always muddy. 
Many Americans in Trinidad have adopted the adobe, and by 
concealing the material with plaster, a very creditable structure 
is the result. The large Catholic church at Trinidad is built of 
roughly-made mud bricks, and looks like a great sod house. The 
adobe and the Mexican belong together. As the American comes 
in, brick and wood are beginning to be used; in the newest towns 
are used altogether. The flat-roofed adobe house, looking like 
pictures one sees in the Bible dictionaries, will soon be remanded 
to the rural districts, and future newspaper correspondents will 
describe it no more. 

The burro is numerous in Trinidad. A procession of burros, 
each little ass with a load of wood on his back as large as him- 
self, is a grave spectacle. At this season of the year the burro 
is seen in families, and so the procession has its variety. First 
comes old Mrs. B. ; then a young burro, about as tall as a saw- 
horse ; then another burro with a little Mexican on deck ; then 
more burros, big and little ; while at the tail of the procession 
comes the owner of the caravan, a middle-aged Mexican. Thus 
all ages and both sexes may be represented, but no member of 
either family ever smiles. Still the burro, for all his humble 
and self-depreciatory expression, is universally well spoken of. 
He has many friends. At least the talk is eulogistic. His posi- 
tion is not unlike that of an editor in politics : he gets the 
complimentary notices, and in return carries all the wood in the 
shape of candidates that can be loaded on his long-suffering 
back. 

Thus I have mentioned the striking figures that attracted me 
as I approached the frontier of New Mexico. As for Trinidad, 
it is a typical mountain town, full of enterprise and hope, and 
with a big faith in coal mines and the cattle trade, of which it is 
the center. The town is not yet over its youthful and festive 
days. With many first-class business men and exemplary citi- 



MOUNTAINS AND MEXICANS. 39 

zens, there are many gentlemen whose lives are devoted to sinful 
games. Occasionally the festivities are summarily abbreviated. 
The last shooting, however, was several weeks ago. The de- 
parted was a "formerly of Kansas" man, and was known, from 
an obliquity of vision, as " Cock- Eyed Frank." One sound busi- 
ness rule, "Pay as you go," is rigidly enforced; at least I saw 
conspicuously posted, the following lines: 

"Jawbone don't go. 
Give me an ante." 

This is submitted for the benefit of the learned in such matters. 
While we are speaking of the wayward and erring, I will say 
for the benefit of those who believe in Bret Harte's stories, that 
I saw a reduced copy of Mr. John Oakhurst. He had just been 
propelled into the gutter by an imperious barkeeper. He did not 
wear Mr. Oakhurst's black suit, nor his varnished boots, but I 
noticed that as he rose from the earth he carefully dusted the few 
clothes he had on with his pocket handkerchief. It is pleasant 
to meet in real life those characters who have so charmed us in 
fiction. 

Quite a group of Kansas men were found in Trinidad, in the 
solid business circles. One of these was Thomas C. Stevens, 
once of Carney, Stevens & Co., of Leavenworth. Mr. Stevens's 
descriptions of gentlemen he formerly knew in Kansas, who com- 
bined patriotism and business, in the proportion of one part of 
the former to about 1,000 of the latter, while not marked by any 
special elegance of diction or rhetorical ornament, were models 
of clear, powerful, seafaring English. 

I had hoped to see Raton Pass by clear daylight, but the train 
passed under a cloudy sky at five o'clock in the morning. Pulled 
by two engines, the train of seven cars slowly climbed the ascent 
till near the summit the fog shut out the prospect. The tunnel 
passed, and the long down slope commenced, the fog lifted and 
the clouds began to break. The mountains on either side seemed 
to rise higher and to almost tear the drifting clouds, but erelong 
they parted as the waves of the Red Sea parted before marching 
Israel, and through an opening in the eastern hills a burst of 
sunshine lit up heaven and earth as we descended to the plains 
of New Mexico. 



THE NEW-MEXICAN REVOLUTION. 



The locomotive climbing the Raton Pass (where once the 
hardy scout or hunter carefully and toilsomely picked his way 
on foot), surmounting with slow but ceaseless labor the grade of 
185 feet to the mile, never ceasing till the crest is reached and 
the pines on the summit quiver to the whistle's blast, and then 
feeling its way carefully down the slope to finally rush with a 
triumphant rattle and roar from the shadows of the mountain 
into the sunlight vastness of the plain, is a symbol of the slow- 
ness with which a new and intense civilization approached the 
confines of New Mexico, and the suddenness with which it finally 
invaded and overran that hitherto silent and voiceless empire. 

The locomotive has always seemed to me the perfection of 
modern mechanism. It embodies so much power with a grace 
that is all its own. It calls into play in its construction all that 
the hand and eye and brain of the mechanic has learned, and is 
perfectly adapted to its purposes. When it appears for the first 
time in a country it marks the departure of the old and the 
coming of the new, and not merely what is new, but what is 
newest. 

This thought has followed me ever since I entered New 
Mexico. The old order, surprised suddenly, has not had time to 
fly or to change, and stands mute in the presence of the new. 
There stands the sun-burned herdsman watching his flocks in the 
waste; here the Mexican woman, with her shawl over her head, 
looks shyly from the door of the adobe hut, just as she has 
looked for all time; while the locomotive dashes by them and the 
telephone wire is strung over their heads to communicate with 
ranches forty miles in the interior. There has never been any- 
thing like it in the world before. 

When one sees this country he realizes that nothing but the 
railroad was powerful enough to affect it. The slow march of 

(40) 



THE NEW-MEXICAN REVOLUTION. 41 

settlements, such as the older Western States knew, would not 
have crossed New Mexico from one border to the other in a 
hundred years. The vastness of these tawny plains is beyond 
the reach of descriptive language ; the loneliness of the buttes, 
each with its castle-like crest of rock, which rise afar against 
the sky ; the gaunt desolateness of the ravines, torn by the floods 
from the mountains; the ruggedness of the passes, apparently 
sunken craters, the " volcano's blinded eye," seem to defy human 
invasion coming by the means which other empires have known. 
A solitary traveler is a mere dot on the surface, a mote between 
the earth and sky ; a caravan is like a piece of driftwood on 
the ocean. Between the great plain and the Western ocean, the 
goal of the traveler, runs a dark line of frowning mountains, 
continuous, like a prison wall, and behind them are seen the 
snowy crests of other mountains, as if to forbid further advance. 
It is as if the inexorable Spirit of the Waste brooded over all, 
and uttered to all who ventured here the command, " March on." 

Here is a country known to civilized man for three hundred 
years, that in that period never produced an invention, nor wrote 
or printed a book, nor had any commerce save .that of wagon 
caravans; now in the space of two years filled with railroads, 
telegraphs, telephones, iron bridges and daily papers. 

From Raton to Las Vegas the traveler sees on one side a plain 
bounded by mountains; on the other a plain as boundless as the 
sea, sometimes broken by the buttes of which I have spoken, 
sometimes by a mass of jagged rock thrust up from the plain 
like a wave. As a rule, it is grass — tawny now, but green when 
the rains come in July and August. Here and there are scat- 
tered herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, numbering thousands 
in all, but seeming few on account of the vast expanse over which 
they range. They did not seem the long-horned wild cattle that 
we associate with the southern prairies, but more like the domes- 
tic cattle of the North. In fact, the very brutes have become 
subject to the influence of the new civilization. The short-horn 
has been introduced, and the old long-horned racer is disappear- 
ing. The whole cattle business is passing from the hands of 
individuals into those of corporations and associations. Rufus 



42 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

Hatch, of Wall street, was at Dodge City the other day, on busi- 
ness connected with one of these corporations, the capital of 
which is furnished in the East. I think everything in this world 
will be run, eventually, by a president, secretary, treasurer and 
board of directors. 

I have spoken of the locomotive as a symbol of civilization, 
but there is another quite as expressive. It is the empty fruit 
and oyster can. These are now strewed all over New Mexico 
and the world. These evidences of departed concentrated pro- 
visions are everywhere now ; in the wake of the Jeannette and 
the trail of African Stanley. A visitor to the interior of the 
pyramids finds the former receptacle of cove oysters, and if you 
take the wings of morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the 
earth you will light on a sardine box. When the would-be ex- 
plorer begins to recite, " This is the forest primeval," his pride is 
crushed by discovering the tomato can of a prior visitor. How 
perfectly New Mexico has been subjugated is shown by the 
amount of old tin strewed over the territory to tempt the appe- 
tite of her goats. 

Las Vegas was visited for a few moments, and then the train 
was taken for the Hot Springs and the Hotel de Montezuma. 
We saw, however, before leaving Las Vegas, a large party of 
Philadelphia excursionists who had just visited the Springs under 
the conductorship of Col. Edward Haren, of the Santa Fe emi- 
gration, excursion and recreation bureau. Two or three parties 
of New Englanders have been brought through the country, be- 
sides the Philadelphians. It seems to be the purpose to exhibit 
to the newly-enlightened New- Mexicans all the different varieties 
of their fellow-citizens of the United States. 

I have spoken of the dark range of mountains constantly 
rising on the traveler's path as he goes south. Breaking through 
these mountains is a brawling stream called Gallinas — (double 1 
sounded like y.) The little river has cut its way down to the 
base of the mountains through wooded defiles and frowning 
canons. Occasionally it runs through a little valley, seeming the 
bed of some former lake, and in one of these little circular val- 
leys, just where the river is to break through the last wall of rock 



THE NEW-MEXICAN REVOLUTION. 43 

and debouch upon the plain, are the Las Vegas Hot Springs and 
the hotels, and the group of cottages. 

The Springs have been known nobody knows how long. The 
Indians reverenced them, just as they did the Great Spirit Springs 
in Kansas. When the Mexican colonists of the Las Vegas grant 
came up from the South they knew their value and embraced 
them in the land they took in severalty. Thirty-three years ago, 
so Rev. Mr. Reed, who was then an army chaplain at Santa Fe, 
tells me, the army doctors were accustomed to send soldiers, the 
victims of their own vices, to the springs to be cured. The old- 
timers aforesaid knew no more about the chemical analysis of 
water than the writer of this, i. e., nothing; they only knew that 
the water did good. When the Americans began to hunt up 
everything valuable, an adobe hotel was built at the springs, 
then the stone building, the Hot Springs House; and finally the 
Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe people built the Montezuma Hotel, 
which I believe to be the finest frame hotel building in America. 
There are larger buildings at Saratoga, but none so elegantly 
finished. The existence of this fine building in a lonely valley, 
traversed a few years ago only by a few Mexicans and burros, 
is the most wonderful thing yet. Every stick in this great house, 
four stories high and three hundred feet long, was brought from 
the northern verge of the United States. All this mass of fur- 
niture, mirrors, carpets, pictures, silver ware, and other details, 
superior to anything I know in Kansas, was brought over the 
mountains. Gas, water, electric bells, pianos, billiard tables, bar 
fixtures, everything known to a modern and fashionable hotel, 
has been collected here. Everything is finished and ready for 
the guests; two hundred fine rooms await them. The bath 
houses have a capacity of five hundred baths per day. The Ar- 
kansas Hot Springs, known and used for the better part of a 
century, have no such conveniences. 

Desirous of seeing something of the surroundings, we took a 
pedestrian trip four miles up the Gallinas. This streams flows, 
cold and swift, from the snows of the Rocky Mountains. It is 
full of eddies and falls and whirls and dimples, and has, when 
running over the rock, the color of topaz. The mountains, 



44 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

closing in a short distance above the hotel, leave for three miles 
a passage for the stream nowhere one hundred feet wide, includ- 
ing the banks proper. Occasionally a jutting cliff drove us into 
or across the stream. A geologist would have gone quite wild. 
Such strata, so many colored, so twisted, overlapped and braided, 
I never saw before. Several times the stream was crossed by a 
stratum of curiously-streaked rock, with bands varying from pure 
white to red. The stripes were extremely delicate — sometimes, 
though clearly defined, not over a tenth of an inch wide. For 
want of a better name we called it "Ribbon Rock." On the 
slopes of the mountain I saw nearly every evergreen common to 
the United States, save the white pine and the hemlock. The 
firs were especially beautiful. 

After walking, sliding, climbing and scrambling for four miles 
the defile widened, and we came to a point where there were 
grassy slopes and a wood-cutter's camp. Here we took the trail, 
made by packers long ago, to return. The narrow trail led far 
up the mountain-side, rising at times above the growth of the 
pines. As we inarched along, the sky became overcast with 
leaden clouds. Far below we could see the windings of the Galli- 
nas. The wind sprang up, and we heard the plaintive moaning 
of the pines, and a few flakes of snow began to fall. In that 
high solitude, and under that sky, and amid the snow, which we 
could see was falling heavily in the distant mountains, we both 
spoke, as if by a common impulse, of the little group in Bret 
Harte's most pathetic story, " The Outcasts of Poker Flat." Not 
doomed, however, to a fate like theirs, we pushed on, and were 
soon at our temporary home, the Montezuma. 

Here a pleasing and curious scene presented itself. Mingled 
with the guests from all parts of the country, and visitors from 
Las Vegas, was a group of country Mexicans, such as live in the 
defiles of the Gallinas. The women mostly wore their black 
shawls over their heads, but there was one conspicuous by a bon- 
net. They looked wonderingly at the building, the palace they 
had seen rise before their eyes within the last few months. A 
man, with a few women, ventured up the first stairway and into 
the long hall, with its carpets and bright gas fixtures. The 



THE NEW-MEXICAN REVOLUTION. 45 

women stopped, but he ventured alone some distance, and then 
called to the others to come on, as he saw no danger. At dinner- 
time they ventured into the dining-room. The men wore their 
hats in, but, when requested, removed them and placed them on 
the rack, seeing which the lady with the bonnet returned and 
removed her head-gear also. Their evident desire to conform 
to the usages of society, and their quiet demeanor, attracted uni- 
versal commendation. 

This hotel is to the people a teacher. It will instruct them. 
Its influence will some of these days be seen in a hundred now 
unknown comforts in every poor Mexican adobe within fifty 
miles. 

The hotels at the Springs have been evoked by the same great 
enterprise which has done so much for Kansas and New Mexico. 
To the invalid or the tourist, who needs change as a medicine 
for mind or body, or both, this resort is now open. I would ad- 
vise that the visit be made not earlier than the latter part of 
May or early in June. I would advise, also, that the first visit 
be made soon, while the great change which this letter has dis- 
cussed is going on. The weariness of this world is the uniformity 
to which it is being reduced. While there is something left as 
God made it, let us for a time enjoy it. It is here now ; it will 
be gone to-morrow. 



FROM LAS VEGAS TO SANTA FE. 



Las Vegas is two towns. The Mexicans, pushing slowly to 
the northward, started a town in 1835, and with the railroad 
came the Americans and started another, and the two lie in long 
lines, parallel with each other, with a row of houses and a street- 
car line connecting them like the membrane which harnessed the 
Siamese twins. The American town has the railroad buildings 
for its nucleus, and is all American. The Mexican town is not 
entirely Mexican, and the plaza is a compromise. Iron-front 
brick buildings, such as small towns have in Kansas, surround 
it; but many of the names on the signs are Mexican. The most 
frequent name is Romero. I think Romero must be Mexican for 
Smith. 

New Las Vegas has its daily newspaper, the Optic, and the 
other Las Vegas the Gazette, but neither is published on what 
may be called Mexican territory. Old Las Vegas has the Jesuits' 
College and the great Catholic church, and the largest hotel, 
"The Plaza." The post office is as near as possible made conve- 
nient to both towns. 

Las Vegas has a boom. It claims 7,000 people, and business 
lots have been sold for $3,000. It shares in the glories of the 
Hot Springs, from which it is only six miles distant. It is the end 
of a railroad division. It has all the elements of a Kansas town, 
when said town is "on the rise." 

Las Vegas is the first town of importance where a traveler 
coming south on the Santa Fe can see the Mexican idea of town- 
building. After he passes that point the novelty will wear off. 
In Las Vegas there is a district called "The Hill," which is 
almost exclusively Mexican. It is to them a favorable spot, be- 
ing utterly barren. The country Mexican seeks the water-side; 
the town Mexican the hills. The best soil for the cultivation of 
"adobes" is a coarse gravel mixed with sand, and strewn with 

(46) 



TKOM LAS VEGAS TO SANTA FE. 47 

judicious liberality with rocks the size of a sixty-four-pound shot. 
No vestige of anything green should grow anywhere near; no 
tree, no flower, no blade of grass. On this firm foundation the 
square, flat-roofed mud house is reared. It is all dry mud except 
the door, the window, and the* posts which hold the roof and pro- 
ject beyond the eaves. It is necessary, too, that the mud should 
be ugly mud. In the composition of adobe bricks, the soil is 
generally dug up in front of the proposed establishment and 
mixed up with water — earth, gravel and all; consequently the 
sides Of the house are ornamented with small rocks sticking in 
the wall. Out in front an oven made of mud is built. Every- 
thing is now complete except to carelessly scatter a few dogs 
around the outside, and insert some men, women and children, 
especially the latter, on the inside. Standing on a bleak, wind- 
swept hill-side one of these houses is a dismal sight. But the 
tendency of the people is toward gregariousness. On regular 
streets what seems a single house will extend the length of a 
block. In other cases, the houses are built around a court-yard. 
The original idea is to have a court-yard for every house, but 
where one party cannot afford so much house, several pool their 
adobes, and complete the square. 

Las Vegas has a new church, built by the Jesuits — a huge 
affair, very wide for its height, and built of dark-red sandstone. 
With its two square towers it is quite imposing. There is nearly 
always something picturesque to be seen about Catholic churches, 
and entering this church late in the afternoon I saw something 
new to me. In front of one of the altars, on which candles were 
burning, knelt some twenty Mexican women and several young 
children. An emaciated cur sniffed around, and distracted the 
attention of the little black-eyed boys. The devotions of the 
group were led by an old woman, who recited prayers in Span- 
ish in a high-pitched, nasal voice, and with the greatest possible 
velocity. Once she broke out and sang a few lines, in a high 
key which was almost a scream, and then resumed as before. 
The women kept their heads and faces and shoulders covered 
with their black shawls, and the scene was weird enough. At 
last the meeting broke up, with a sort of exhortation by the old 



48 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

female "class leader," to each of the departing worshippers. A 
"female prayer meeting" seemed to me a novelty in the Catho- 
lic church. 

Taking the way freight in the early morning, the journey was 
resumed. The long stretch of plains from Raton to Las Vegas 
had been continued to the point of monotony, and it was agreea- 
ble as well as unexpected to find that the road soon after leav- 
ing Las Vegas entered upon constantly varying mountain 
scenery. There was a change, too, in the air — a suspicion that 
we were going south. The mountains seemed less stern and for- 
bidding than they had before; the pine forest which covered the 
slopes took a warmer shade of green. We skirted what seemed 
to have once been a huge wall, shutting in the waters of an in- 
land sea. Here were capes, promontories, headlands, and long 
straight lines of abandoned shore, and down the slopes were 
lines marking the successive ebbs of the water as it sank. At 
the crest of the seemingly unending range rose a perpendicular 
wall of rock, such as is common in the Blue Ridge range in the 
South. In the distance rose a snowy range, now in plain sight, 
now disappearing, as the train wound on its devious way. The 
engineering difficulties of the route were enormous, but were 
overcome by the sharp curves, sometimes defining the shape of 
the letter S, and the bold grades, once deemed impossible, but 
now surmounted with apparent ease by the enormous engines 
which modern locomotive builders have constructed. 

It is probable that every defile and mountain has its story, but 
in a country which, until recently, had few "abstract and brief 
chroniclers of the time," these are only preserved by oral tradi- 
tion. One mountain has, however, a melancholy celebrity. A 
party of Mexicans were once driven to its summit by Indians, 
and there surrounded till they perished of starvation and thirst. 
Through the clear air two crosses can be seen, erected to mark 
the spot where they met their fate. There, on the wind-swept 
height, in the atmosphere where nothing decays, those crosses 
will stand to tell their story of suffering and cruelty, to thou- 
sands on thousands of passers-by. It made one's heart ache to 
think that while those poor men were dying of thirst they could 



FROM LAS VEGAS TO SANTA FE. 49 

see below them the windings of a stream of cold, clear water, 
which irrigated, perhaps, their own little fields. It seemed as if 
we would never get away from the doleful mountain. At times 
I thought we had escaped it, in the windings of the road, but 
another turn brought it in sight again, with its crosses, eighteen 
hundred years ago and still the sign of voiceless agony. 

Several Mexican villages were passed, sleeping in the sun, one 
with a little church, a mere hut; another, San Miguel, with a 
large church with two towers. There is a singular absence of 
life or stir about these places. One could easily believe them 
uninhabited. The men were at work plowing in the fields; the 
women keep indoors, and passing by one may often see them sit- 
ting on the floor in a circle, like Turkish women, conversing on 
such subjects as may enter their Mexican minds. 

All the road was interesting. The traveler who goes no farther 
into the country than Las Vegas will lose much. The scenery 
below is varied, and has the charm of novelty. Whatever form 
these mountains take, they are unlike any others. 

One objective point on the road was the old Pecos church, the 
subject of a thousand legends. For myself I am no autiquarian, 
and have no special theory in regard to the past of New Mexico. 
The curious in such matters are referred to the essays by Major 
Inman and others. I only tell what I saw, with a view to give 
an idea of things present, for the benefit of future tourists. 

Nothing in this country looks as I anticipated. I had formed 
the impression that the ruined Pecos church rose bare and gaunt 
from the midst of a level plain, but I caught my first sight of it 
through the vistas of a pine forest, and far below the level of the 
track. It looked, in the distance, like the shell of a burned 
brick kiln. 

We got out at Levy, a station consisting of the little depot and 
the agent's cabin, surrounded by tall pines which gave forth a 
balsamic odor. A red road, over which the teamsters haul cedar 
posts and countless railroad ties from the forest-covered moun- 
tains, ran down into the valley. We followed it, and soon came 
into old fields covered with scattered dwarf cedars. The fields 
looked like the old fields of the South. One would have said, 



50 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

seeing them in the South, that cotton had grown upon them 
within a few years. We kept on, crossing two or three deep 
ravines, cut in the red soil; then toiled through the dried, sandy 
bed of an extinct river, a hundred yards wide, and saw before us 
the former site of the Pueblo of the Pecos. 

Imagine a great spoon lying convex side up, and you have the 
ground plan. A long sandstone ridge, perhaps seventy-five feet 
above the general level of the plain and the dead river, forms 
the handle. The ridge is in places not over 100 feet wide on 
top, and is a bare, sun-bleached rock. Along its sides great 
masses of stone have broken off and fallen down. The bowl of 
the spoon forms a plateau of a few acres, and on it stand the 
ruins of the town and the church, the ruins beginning where the 
handle joins the bowl. Great masses of small stones and earth 
are piled up, and from the heaps project timbers. The houses 
were two and perhaps more stories high, and built around court- 
yards, as in the present day. The outlines are distinctly visible. 
Here and there are circular depressions where the grass shows 
green. These are said by some to have been wells or cisterns; 
by others, council houses. 

At the end of the village where the bowl ( turned over) is the 
highest stand the ruins of the church, its roofless adobe walls 
rising in places to the height of thirty feet. It is, or was, a Catholic 
church of the most approved order. Its interior is cruciform. 
Here is the chancel, here the nave, here the altar recess, here the 
entrance from the sacristy. The joists projecting from the wall 
show rude carving. Where was the altar is a pile of earth. 
We saw an excavation, and near by a fragment of a human 
skull. Some curiosity seekers had dug from under the ruined 
altar the bones of the priest who had once officiated there, and 
fragments of his Franciscan robe. 

This was the ruin; how long since the swarms of Indian work- 
men raised its walls is not and may never be exactly known. 
The town was an old one when the Spanish came in 1536. It is 
one of the places connected by Indian tradition with the story 
of Montezuma. Abbe Domenec's story being taken for true that 
the Spaniards had possession of numerous Indian villages in 



FROM LAS VEGAS TO SANTA FF,. 51 

1542, this church may have been built then. It must be over 
two hundred years old. It has been an absolute ruin for more 
than fifty. Its preservation in its present shape is another proof 
that there is nothing so indestructible as simple earth. Masonry 
might have fallen; the natural rock all around has crumbled; 
but these earthen walls, five feet thick, unless destroyed inten- 
tionally by man may rear their sunburnt front in the lone valley 
of the Pecos for a thousand years to come. 

Where man comes and goes away he leaves a solitude more 
desolate than he found. Around the valley rose the mountains 
to the sky. To the northward the high peaks were wrapped in 
clouds, and although the sun of May was shining, the snow could 
be seen falling on those cold and distant heights. Sweeping 
around almost in a semi-circle was the great mountain wall I 
have before mentioned, closing in on the east and south; to the 
west rose gentle slopes, dark with the forest. It was a lovely yet 
lonely spot. The vagrant wind waved the long grass that grew 
from the ruins; a great cactus spread its skeleton fingers; a sol- 
itary crow, balancing on uneven wing, endeavored to beat up 
against the wind. 

Here was solitude. The Indian, the Spaniard, and thousands 
of later visitors had been here and left their names and gone. 
Upon the mountain-side could be seen a little white cloud of 
moving vapor from a locomotive, but with a hurried echo linger- 
ing behind it, this latest invader came and went. And yet where 
we sat and watched the hurrying clouds cast their vanishing 
shadows upon the mountain-side and plain, hundreds and thou- 
sands of human beings had been born and lived, laughed and wept, 
and hoped and loved, and despaired and died. Feeling secure, 
doubtless, on their ridge in the midst of the valley, the Indians 
had cultivated their fields, perhaps thousands of acres, along the 
banks of the Pecos half a mile away, and, as I believe, along the 
shores of the stream now dried up which ran beneath their walls. 
From their town they went forth in the morning; to it they 
returned at eve. According to tradition, so industrious were 
they that they collected provision for two or three years in ad- 
vance. They had chosen a noble site; these mountains seemed 



52 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

a shelter for them — a barrier against their foes. They proved 
neither. The new god, whose temple they reared, in time seemed 
as powerless as the old. The fields are now wastes; the town is 
a heap of stones and earth; and the roofless church is a monu- 
ment of desolation. Thousands pass it by, but none remain. 
The strongest and the wisest must possess the earth. Coronado 
passed by the spot in 1542, on his long and fruitless march. 
What a savage wilderness lay between him and the sounding 
Atlantic ! Seventy-eight years after, a band of shivering Eng- 
lish emigrants stood under the bleak December sky and con- 
fronted Frenchman and Spaniard and Indian. From that hour 
the idea of a great American-Europeau Catholic Empire in 
America was made impossible. Today this ruined church is an 
emblem and evidence of that lost dream. This railroad, built 
by the lineal descendants of those very Puritan exiles, is the 
sign and symbol of the future. The Spaniard brought ruin ; 
the descendants of the Englishman of the Seventeenth century 
will bring restoration. The Indians cannot come back; the fire 
of Montezuma which they are said to have kept burning amid 
the ruins of Pecos has gone out forever; but as we passed we 
saw that the Mexican farmer had discarded the wooden plow, 
and was turning over the soil with the bright share of the Amer- 
ican. The mines opened by the Spaniards were filled up, but 
a, few hundred yards from the little station of Levy, Americans 
were sinking a shaft, not for gold or silver this time, but for use- 
ful copper. All that was good will come back, increased an 
hundred fold. 

It is very difficult, I may say, to gain accurate information in 
regard to distances, etc., in this country. The Mexican does not 
understand you ; the American, in many instances, does not know 
or does not care. We had been given the distance of the ruin 
from the station by half a dozen persons, as varying from half a 
mile to three miles. A note of our expedition may help future 
visitors. 

We left Las Vegas on the way freight at about nine o'clock; 
we arrived at Levy at half-past one; we visited the ruin and re- 
turned to the station in time for the passenger train bound south, 



FROM LAS VEGAS TO SANTA FE. 53 

at half-past four. The distance to the church may be safely 
called one mile and a half. 

The road presents no difficulties that a good walker, lady or 
gentleman, cannot surmount. We took dinner with the train- 
men at Fulton. Visitors can supply themselves with lunch at 
Las Vegas. No traveler from the North should fail to visit the 
church. The history of this old country must be gathered in 
chapters; by degrees, as it were, and this old ruin is a strange 
leaf in the book of time. 

The afternoon sun was declining when the passenger train came 
along, and we resumed our journey. We passed Glorieta, and 
the wild walls of the Apache canon, and, changing cars at Lamy 
Junction, turned again to the northward. In the slant sun to the 
westward we saw new mountains; true mountains in their out- 
line, in color and form, such as we see in great pictures, and in 
dreams, "the purple peaks, that tear the drifting clouds of gold." 
They rose from the plains, a group by themselves, beautiful and 
alone. Looking at them, we forgot all else, and started with 
surprise when the brakemau called "Santa Fe!" 
4 



HOURS IN SANTA F£. 



With the exception of Savannah, with its shady streets of green 
and gloom, its old houses with iron-barred lower windows; its 
Spanish and Huguenot names, I have never seen an American 
city which so impressed and won me as Santa Fe. Between the 
two cities there is scarcely a point of resemblance. One is al- 
most on a level with the sea, the other is 7,000 feet above it; 
one is surrounded by low pine woods and rice swamps and reedy 
marshes, the other looks from the lap of mountains which rise 
to the realms of sterility and snow. In fact they have nothing 
in common, save that both remind one of Spain, and both are 
very old. 

In traveling usually one soon wearies of a place and longs to 
hurry on to another, but I find myself lingering here and reluc- 
tant to go. I discover that I am more than usually reluctant to 
do anything "on time," and disposed to lounge around the plaza 
or walk about the narrow streets and talk to the Kansas fellows 
who live here, and who seem coming into town as if to a meetiug 
of the Republican Central Committee or State Convention. The 
first evening of my arrival, I met Prof. George F. Gaumer, whom 
I had known as a student in the University at Lawrence, who 
has since traveled all over Cuba and Yucatan as a naturalist, 
and is now living here with his pretty Kansas wife, teaching 
Spanish, (how is that for Kansas?) and acting as professor in 
the University of New Mexico. Then there is Ed. L. Bartlett, 
formerly of Wyandotte, and Mrs. Bartlett, the society of either, 
to say nothing of both, being sufficient to induce a Kansas man 
to stay in Santa Fe a year ; and last, but not least by any means, 
is my rotund old friend, of all my years in Kansas, Father Def- 
ouri, now the Padre of the Church of Our Lady of Guadaloupe, 
an edifice which he is overhauling in a manner calculated to 
astonish the bones of the ancient Mexicans buried under and 

(54) 



HOURS IN SANTA FE. 55 

around it. Going along the plaza I met, day before yesterday, 
Gov. Harvey, " bearded like the pard," just in from his survey- 
ing labors. The first morning of my stay Dr. Seibor, formerly 
of Ellsworth, drove up, and yesterday I rode out with him to 
the Indian village of Tesuque. 

In Kansas by this time it must be warming up, but here there 
is the sun of May with a darker blue in the cloudless sky than 
I have noticed elsewhere, and yet there is snow on the mountains 
and a touch of early winter or late fall in the air. They say it 
never goes above 85° in the summer. The cottonwoods and the 
alfalfa in the little plaza are bright and green, but the irrigated 
gardens, shut in by breast-high adobe walls, are hardly begin- 
ning to show color. And, speaking of the plaza, brings me 
back to Kansas or Kansans again. The soldiers' monument in 
the center of the plaza, which commemorates the valor of the 
heroes of New Mexico who fought Indians and those whom the 
monument in uncompromising language on unyielding marble 
calls " rebels," was erected at the instance of Gen. Bob Mitchell, 
of Kansas, who, poor fellow, passed the other day, amid the 
shadows of poverty, to his grave. In front of a store facing the 
plaza, Richard Weightman, once a familiar figure in Atchison, 
stabbed and killed, in self-defense, Felix Aubrey, the famous 
rider ; and in the Exchange Hotel, at a corner of the plaza, Col. 
John P. Slough was murdered. Both Weightman and Slough 
are very kindly spoken of here by men who knew them inti- 
mately. In the old "Palace" on the plaza, W. F. M. Arny 
served five years as Secretary of the Territory, and Capt. John 
Pratt a still longer time as United States Marshal. A Kansas 
man ought to feel at home here. 

To get down to a semblance of business, Santa Fe is a town 
of nine thousand inhabitants, of whom two-thirds are natives. 
It claims to be the oldest town in the United States, but nothing 
can be told of its age by its appearance. An adobe house takes 
"no note of time." It looks as old in a week as it will after 
ten thousand years of existence. For all one can see, Santa Fe 
may have been built ten years ago, or Adam may have irrigated 
the Garden of Eden from the little Rio Santa Fe. There is no 



56 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

mistake, however, about its being very old. Mr. Ellison, the 
old Acting Territorial Librarian, "has the papers" on that. 
There was, from the dawn of time, an Indian village here, and 
"the Santa Fe Town Company," as I presume it was called, 
began operations in 1597. Archbishop Lamy, who has known 
the town since 1850, says it changes very little in its general ap- 
pearance. It was a town of five thousand inhabitants at the time 
of the American occupation, and what has been done since, until 
the railroad came, has been done on the old plan. The United 
States Government in its buildings adopted the adobe, and 
Americans generally did the same. Even now, in the construc- 
tion of brick residences, the old one-story, roomy house, with its 
placita, or court, is followed as a model. The Exchange Hotel, 
where this letter is written, is one of the large hotels of the 
town, and it is but an extension of an old Mexican house, a one- 
story adobe, with two little court-yards, into which the sun 
shines without let or hindrance; a rambling, irregular, curious 
old place, with big bed-rooms, each with a back door and a front, 
opening into the placita and the street, and no ceiling overhead — 
just the bare joists. A queer and comfortable place, better a 
thousand times, to my taste at least, than a box and bell-cord in 
the sixth story of an American hotel. 

The town is an aggregate of such houses, and smaller ones, 
with some modern brick and frame houses already built, and 
others coming. The first royal Governor, the Hon. Pedro de Pe- 
ralta, appears to have said in first arranging the town, "Here we 
will have a little square plaza, and on this side of it the Gover- 
nor's palace shall be built, and around it we will have business 
houses; and for the rest, you can build where you like, only do 
not take up too much room with your streets." Then the inhab- 
itants went to work, with a spider web for a model, and located 
streets and alleys, and built long lines of adobe houses on each 
side, with originally no windows on the street side, and with but 
a large gate opening from the street into the placita. On the 
street front they erected porches running from house to house, 
for hundreds of feet, so that in Santa Fe you may walk long 
distances without stepping into the sun, or the rain — when it 



HOURS IN SANTA f£. 57 

falls. The Rio Santa Fe, a little stream from the mountains, 
runs through a wide rocky bed in the midst of the town, separat- 
ing it into two portions; and on this stream the women of both 
towns met and discussed the hired-girl question, and washed their 
clothes. 

This is a rough outline of what appears to be the general plan 
of Santa Fe. Going up on the hill which overlooks the town, 
you may, from the earthwork called Fort Marcy, see all over 
Santa Fe as it is now, and in your mind you can reconstruct it 
as it was. You see large squares which look like dried-up ponds: 
they are the flat roofs of the adobe houses. This flat surface was 
originally broken only by occasional trees and the higher walls 
of the churches. 

The Spaniards, on their occupation of a country, build at 
once a fort and a church. Santa Fe has, consequently, some 
very old churches which are the first objects of interest visited 
by strangers. The oldest of these is San Miguel, St. Michael 
being greatly venerated in these parts. The original church was 
built, no one knows exactly when, but it is said in 1640. The 
Pueblo Indians destroyed it in the revolt of 1680, and it was re- 
built in 1710. On a beam under the gallery it is stated that it 
was built by the Marquis de Penuela. His whole name was 
"The Admiral Don Jose Chacon Medina Salazar Villasenor, 
Knight of the Order of Santiago, Governor and Captain General 
of this Kingdom of New Mexico; " but he did not sign his name 
in full because there was not room enough on the beam. San 
Miguel on the outside looks like an immense and badly con- 
structed sod-house. The inside is long, narrow and high, with a 
little gallery supported by a cross-beam and the great name of 
the Marquis de Penuela. There are a number of pictures, age 
unknown — perhaps painted in Spain, perhaps in old Mexico. 
They are very ugly, as is San Miguel itself. What is true of San 
Miguel is true of San Francisco. This church is at present cu- 
riously situated. The great stone church, which has been four- 
teen years in building, completely incloses it, and shuts out the 
sun in a great degree, causing some of the strangest effects of 
light and shadow imaginable. Through the open doors comes a 



58 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

bit of bright sunshine; daylight from some source falls on the 
high altar; between them is dim shadow, made more strange and 
ghastly by the Mexican women, closely covered by their black 
shawls, who kneel in silence before a little altar in an alcove. 

The most interesting church to me was that of Our Lady of 
Guadaloupe. This church has been turned over to the Rev. 
James H. Defouri, formerly of Kansas, for the use of the English- 
speaking Catholics of Santa Fe. It is probably nearly as old as 
San Francisco; but what a change, my countrymen! Father 
Defouri found the church, like all old churches, without seats or 
a fire. He has introduced pews and a stove. I understand that 
the latter was considered a frightful innovation, the faithful hav- 
ing relied for ages on their piety to keep them warm, but the 
pews were a distinguished success. On the first Sunday they 
were opened to the public they were filled with natives, delighted 
to worship in comfort. A Kansas man may be considered the 
reformer of New-Mexican church interiors. Many tourists will 
doubtless feel shocked by the lack of reverence for the antique 
shown in putting a new roof on this church; it may be a comfort 
to such to know that on the other hand to Father Defouri is due 
the preservation of the remarkable altar-piece, perhaps the finest 
specimen of Spanish-American art in New Mexico. It was 
painted in Mexico by Josephus Alzibar, in 1683, and on account 
of its size was brought to Santa Fe in three pieces. It portrays 
in four tableaux the old Mexican legend of Juan, the Pueblo, to 
whom the Virgin appeared thrice, and left as a proof of the 
reality of her visit her full-length portrait on his mantle. Show- 
ing this to the Bishop, who had been before incredulous, a church 
of Our Lady of Guadaloupe was erected on the spot designated 
by her in her first meeting with the Indian. The three figures at 
the top of the picture, representing the Trinity, are beautifully 
drawn; and the whole design is spirited. This picture was being 
destroyed by leaking rain, and its base was nearly hidden by a 
pile of dirt. It has now been inclosed in a frame, and is to be 
more perfectly restored. Kansas people will not fail to visit the 
Guadaloupe church, to see the painting and listen to the expla- 
nation by their former fellow-citizen. In the sacristy was pru- 



HOURS IN SANTA FE. 59 

dently concealed a hideous picture taken from the church, and 
the worthy Father was kind enough not to dispute the writer's 
expressed belief that the artist is now in purgatory. 

There are other churches, but those mentioned are the most 
interesting. 

In another letter, other points of interest will be mentioned. 
This letter is addressed confidentially to Kansaus at home, to tell 
them the "lay of the land." They should visit Santa Fe, if 
they propose to do so, at once. They will find friends here in the 
shape of former acquaintances, and will make more after they 
get here. In particular, they will meet a pleasant welcome from 
Governor Sheldon, to whom the writer is indebted for many 
courtesies. They will find now many things which a few years 
later will have disappeared. It is but forty-eight hours' ride 
from Atchison to Santa Fe, and in that distance you seem to have 
passed from one world to another. Leaving things modern and 
familiar, you can be surrounded here by strange faces, strange 
houses, strange churches, and all around a frame of mountains 
as charming as the Delectable Mountains which rose before the 
delighted vision of Bunyan's Pilgrim. And so, "more anon." 



SOMETHING MORE ABOUT SANTA FE. 



Santa Fe is the historical center of New Mexico, and its civil, 
ecclesiastical and military capital. The seat of the first is, as it 
has been for two hundred years continuously, the long adobe 
building which forms one side of the plaza, and which is the 
only building in the United States called, of right, a "palace." 
Gov. Lionel A. Sheldon sits literally in the place of the royal 
governors, and the Mexican Republican Governors and political 
chiefs who have ruled in all sorts of fashions this queer old 
country. He wears the mantle of the brave Otermin, the lofty 
Marquis de Penuela, he of the many titles; of the unfortunate 
Perez, of Margales, last of the Spanish rulers, and so on down. 
The palace is a long, low, shadowy building, with a wide porch, 
and if all the varied characters who for two centuries or more 
have walked under that porch and have entered those deep-set 
doors, could at one time "revisit the glimpses of the moon" for 
the benefit of the present incumbent, he could a tale unfold more 
wonderful than Hamlet, or Macbeth, or the guilty Richard. 
Proud Grandee of Spain, from the streets of Seville or the banks 
of the Guadalquiver; long-robed Franciscan; fierce and wily In- 
dian; aspiring Mexican chieftain; American soldier; Kit Carson, 
and all the famous men of the plain and mountain, have walked 
under the portal of the old palace. In one room, piled in dusty 
heaps, breast high, are papers and parchments which may yet 
prove a mine more precious than gold to the patient historian. 
Beginning with the story of the re-conquest of the country, by 
Diego del Vargas, written in 1693, these papers cover ail of life 
in New Mexico until the day when a new and strange flag waved 
above the Palace, and Governors speaking a new language 
reigned within its walls. Somewhere in these heaps is a paper of 
great interest to the writer. It is a detailed statement of the 
expenses incurred in the arrest and detention of Captain Zebulon 

(60) 



SOMETHING MORE ABOUT SANTA FE. 61 

M. Pike, a hero whose name and fame there is an humble effort 
to preserve in the sketch, "Pike, of Pike's Peak." The custo- 
dian of the archives is Mr. Ellison, the Territorial Librarian, 
who looks nearly as old as his charge. 

While no adequate appropriation has ever been made to have 
the papers arranged, classified and preserved, Mr. Ellison has 
regarded their care as a labor of love. During eight months 
that he was a sufferer from a broken limb, he solaced with these 
old documents the weary hours. He showed me some of the 
oldest records. They are on fine Italian paper, the writing 
covering only the right half of the page, leaving room for re- 
marks and annotations. The handwriting is clear and the ink 
scarcely faded. Those old Spaniards did some things very well. 
It is noticeable that the older the records the more care is dis- 
played in their preparation. 

A thoughtful person seeing these papers longs to penetrate the 
mysteries of the early history of New Mexico, but really very 
little has been drawn from this source. Judge Rich, who is to 
New Mexico what Judge Frank Adams is to Kansas, has col- 
lected many books on the history of Mexico and New Mexico, 
but there is nothing which can be called a history of the latter. 
Of the modern books, " El Gringo," by a Pennsylvanian named 
Davis, who was Attorney General of the Territory twenty-five 
years ago, is as good as any. Davis appears to have been a one- 
horse politician, entirely destitute of imagination, quite com- 
monplace, and troubled with a clumsy and elephantine humor; 
but his story is a straight one, and has the merit of brevity. 

The history of New Mexico will be found an uneventful one. 
From the days of the Spanish conquest but two serious revolu- 
tions have occurred, that of 1680, when the Spaniards were 
driven out by the Indians, and that of 1837, when Gov. Perez 
was murdered. The Indians had been nominally Christianized 
in 1837, and yet behaved with more ferocity than in 1680. An 
attempt at insurrection against the United States, shortly after 
the occupation by the Americans, was easily suppressed by Col. 
Price, afterwards Gen. Sterling Price, of the Confederate army. 

The truth is, New Mexico was until recently a far-away coun- 



62 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

try. Shut in by mountains or immense plains, it was a land 
apart. The Mexican revolution, which for ten years preceding 
1820 deluged Old Mexico with blood, was scarcely heard of in 
New Mexico, and the country submitted to the Americans with 
hardly a show of resistance. Whether it was Spanish Governor 
General, Mexican political chief, or American Governor ap- 
pointed at Washington, Santa Fe has always been the capital, 
and all the varying forms of sovereignty have been accepted 
with about equal resignation. The vigorous and arbitrary rule 
of the Spanish is, however, best remembered, and occasionally 
Gov. Sheldon is appealed to by some simple Mexican in a way 
that indicates belief in his absolute power to do what he likes — 
a lingering relic of the effect of old-time rule. 

Santa Fe is the capital of a province not limited by the 
boundaries of New Mexico, but embracing Colorado and a vast 
stretch of mountain country, and the head of that great spirit- 
ual empire is the Archbishop of Santa Fe. His face is recog- 
nized and his authority exercised over a larger region, probably, 
than owns the sway of any other Archbishop in the Catholic 
church ; and in town or country, in civilized city or Indian 
pueblo, from Oregon to the boundary of Mexico, all along the 
backbone of the continent, the best-known name is that of the 
Rt. Rev. John B. Lamy. Civil Governors come and go, but 
this tall, slender, elderly Franco-American remains with un- 
changing and unbroken power. Under his rule and through 
his energy Santa Fe is becoming one of the great seats of 
Catholic education and influence, with a cathedral, a hospital 
and schools, all projected on a scale which may be termed vast, 
and which will preserve his name for unknown time to come. 

The Bishop's Garden is one of the sights of Santa Fe. Com- 
ing early into possession of a plat of ground containing a spring 
sufficient to irrigate the whole city of Santa Fe, he has created 
such a spot of greenery as must surprise the barren mountain- 
peaks which look down upon it. Within that high adobe wall 
grows every fruit tree which will exist in the climate and alti- 
tude, and although the Archbishop has passed nearly all his life 
in this country, there is a reminiscence of France in the formal 



SOMETHING MORE ABOUT SANTA FE. 63 

little garden which is distinctively his own, with its pears and 
grapes trained against the wall, as you see them in Normandy. 
It was in this little garden, walking to and fro with his breviary 
in his hand, that the writer saw the famous Archbishop of the 
Mountains for the first, possibly for the last, time. The Arch- 
bishop's house is built after the Mexican fashion, its placita 
opening directly on the street. In the center of the neat little 
court was found a fountain, and two beautiful little children, 
with a Mexican nurse girl, were playing about, for the apart- 
ments, except a few occupied by the Archbishop, are rented. 
The doors and the regular entrance to the garden were found 
closed, but one of the little girls went toddling and prattling 
about, insisting that she knew the road, and so by a circuitous 
and forbidden path we entered the grounds. We loitered about, 
admiring the ponds with their myriads of fish, the paths, the 
white-blossomed strawberries, and every detail of the little Eden, 
when we suddenly came face to face with the owner of the grounds, 
who had evidently thought that he had securely shut out the 
world. The situation into which our little volunteer guide had 
led us was, for a moment, embarrassing, but the Archbishop 
soon recovered from his surprise, and treated us with his 
accustomed politeness; and his tall figure, his fine eyes and com- 
manding features seemed appropriately framed in the bright sur- 
roundings. He showed us his parlor, with a fine carved marble 
mantel made by a native New-Mexican, and pictures and em- 
broideries, the work of pupils in his schools. He explained that 
once he lived for months in Santa Fe without seeing a for- 
eign visitor, but now, with the advent of the railroad, hundreds 
of excursionists visited the grounds, and, he intimated, tres- 
passed somewhat on his time and patience. Going out into the 
court, we found the little author of our troubles in company 
with her younger sister, radiant with triumph over her achieve- 
ment in showing us the grounds. She was caught up and 
soundly kissed for her wickedness. 

Santa Fe is, beside its civil and ecclesiastical supremacy, the 
military headquarters of the district, as it was in the old Spanish 
time. The Government has reserved several squares which are 



64 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

inclosed in high walls and covered with one-story adobe bar- 
racks, and the neat residences of the officers. The garrison band 
usually plays in the little shaded plaza three times a week, and 
is one of the attractions of the town. At the time of our visit 
the troops had gone in search of Indians, and the parade and 
barracks seemed quite forlorn. 

There was a town before Santa Fe was founded, and no one 
may know how old it was, and there still exists, six miles from 
Santa Fe, the pueblo of Tesuque, in form and construction ex- 
actly the same as it was in the days of Cortez. I rode out to it 
in company with Dr. Seibor, formerly of Ellsworth, who had 
never visited it before, and consequently our inspection was not 
as thorough and intelligent as it might have been, though very 
pleasant. The road runs over a high ridge, and for much of the 
distance in the bed of a long, dried-up river. The scene was 
thoroughly New-Mexican. The sun-burnt road, the thousands 
of yellow, sun-blistered and serried ridges, covered with a thin 
growth of cedars and pinon, and the groups of burros loaded 
with wood, and driven by Indians; and occasionally a party of 
American prospectors mounted on gaunt horses, with their bur- 
ros with sacks of flour and other necessaries, marching on before. 
All these men carried arms and looked serious. I think the 
solemn mountains and the purple sky have a tendency to make 
people quiet and sedate, even without an uncertain tenure to 
one's scalp being added. Indians were seen plowing in the fields 
by the roadside. They used a plow made of three sticks — a big 
long one for the beam, a sharp one for the share, and a crooked 
one for the handle. The plows ricochetted along at the heels of 
diminutive black-and-white oxen. The Indian costume is very 
simple: it consists of hair, shirt and leggins. The Pueblo Indian 
is the inventor of that capillary mutilation known as the "bang." 
His heavy black hair hangs over his forehead, and is cut square 
across even with his eyebrows. It is very sweet. In childhood 
the hair is cut close to the head, with the exception of a fringe 
round the lower border, which curls up like a duck's tail. This 
adds a great charm to Pueblo infancy. 

A pueblo is a big mud house built around a court. In con- 



SOMETHING MORE ABOUT SANTA FE. 65 

struction it reverses the principle of a block-house. The upper 
story, instead of projecting, is withdrawn. The householder 
ascends to the top of a lower story by a ladder, and enters 
"up-stairs" by a door. If there were no ladder he could shin 
up the lightning rod. A door on the ground floor would hurt 
the feelings of the late Montezuma. We entered several apart- 
ments, including that of the Governor, who has a T-shaped 
opening in the front of his house through which he can look 
out and see everything. He was looking when we met him, 
assisted by his wife and child. All three just sat and looked. 
When spoken to they made no reply, but just looked. In the 
course of a year they must see a great deal. Occasionally a 
woman or child came out on the upper deck, like a prairie dog, 
and took a look. Others were at work cutting wood. In an 
apartment we saw a girl, whose costume consisted of two yards 
of half-width calico arranged iu festoons, grinding meal. A slab 
of hard rock is fastened at an incline in a trough, and the corn 
is rubbed on this with a stone rolling-pin. The little soft black- 
and-white corn is worn up very rapidly. The rooms were swept 
very clean, but pervaded with a peculiar and pungent odor. 
The Pueblos are ugly, sullen, personally dirty, and very indus- 
trious. They are nominally Catholics, but are said to be in fact 
heathen, who believe in the second coming of Montezuma. 
They seemed to be looking for him when I saw them. The 
Tesuque Indians are said to be poorer and less aristocratic than 
those of other Pueblos. In the matter of ugliness they cannot 
be excelled by any Indians I have seen except our own lost 
Kaws. Some Apaches who came into Santa Fe on horseback 
looked like noblemen beside the citizens of Tesuque. 

I tried, from the conversation of old residents, to reconstruct 
the old-time Santa Fe, but in vain. Contrary to my pre- 
vious belief, I found Santa Fe during the days of the old over- 
land trade was a quiet town. The traders parked their wagons 
on the plaza, and camped themselves on a piece of ground known 
as the "United States." Each wagon paid a license of $500. 
The principal occupation was gambling, and the most famous 
gambler in Santa Fe was a native woman, Gertrudes Barcelone, 



66 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

who died rich and was buried with all the honors of the church. 
The native people have changed their costume and habits by 
almost imperceptible degrees, but enough remains to interest the 
traveler. There is an old curiosity shop on San Francisco street 
which will tell you more in half an hour than I can in many 
letters. The sulky clerk will say nothing to you if you do not 
speak to him, and you will be at liberty to examine the collec- 
tion at your leisure. Such old swords, such daggers, such books 
from mouldy convents, such costumes, Spanish, Mexican and In- 
dian, you will not find elsewhere. Tn that odd place you can 
weave your dreams into a continuous web from Cabeza de Vaca 
to Governor Sheldon. If you would further call up the spirits 
of the past, go, if you are a man and not too scrupulous, into a 
saloon or dancing-hall, and ask the Mexican guitarist and his 
Italian companions with their violins to play for you " La Fresca 
Rosa," or the fine air of "Cinco de Mayo." In hearing it you 
will perceive and almost feel for yourself that uncaring and idle 
spirit which has enabled these New-Mexicans to live on, unresist- 
ing and content, alike under oppression and freedom, amid the 
gathering dust of eventless centuries or the noise and stir of 
these last progressive years. The tinkle and the tang of the 
guitar, a fresh cigarette, the invariable " quien sabe" to every 
troublesome question, are enough, and the crazy world may go 
on with all its busy madness for all that Jose or Jesus Maria 
cares. You know all this when you hear the music, and you 
momentarily adopt the sentiment as your own. 

There are a few towns it is a pleasure or a necessity to forget. 
You would not remember them if you could ; you could not if 
you would. But I doubt if I ever lose anything of the impres- 
sions of dusty, "dobe" Santa Fe. Possibly the kindness I re- 
ceived there would preserve the memory of the old place if there 
were nothing else, but the people and the place will serve each 
to keep the recollection of the other. 

Of Santa Fe as a business point I can say but little, since I 
have no weakness for business of any sort, but I know that if I 
was dyspeptic, worn out, a-weary of the world, tired of living 
and yet afraid of dying, I should come to Santa Fe in the sum- 



SOMETHING MORE ABOUT SANTA FE. 67 

mer-time and take some big, high white washed rooms in a Mexi- 
can house, with the fireplace in the corner; and with books at 
home and a horse to ride abroad, I believe I could find a new 
body and a fresh soul. I would lounge on the plaza and admire 
the unique ugliness of the three old crones who have haunted it 
from time immemorial, and do nothing with great care and elab- 
oration for awhile, and then I would return to the United States 
and join the "march of progress," which is doubtless a great- 
thing, but which makes many people footsore. 

What has been written has been written as the truth. I can 
only hope that such of my friends as may visit Santa Fe here- 
after may find there as much to cheer and interest them as I did 






ALBUQUERQUE AND ITS NEIGHBORHOOD. 



Leaving Santa Fe in the middle of a bright afternoon (all af- 
ternoons are bright now), we arrived without disturbance at 
Lainy Junction, and lay around for the passenger train bound 
south, which, however, was preceded by an excursion train loaded 
with a party from Massachusetts. These excursions are a fea- 
ture of the "Santa Fe's" business this season, and have resulted 
in bringing more gentlemen with gray side-whiskers and more 
ladies with eye glasses into these western wilds, than were ever 
known before. This party was piloted as several others have 
been lately, by my old and valued friend Col. Ed. Hareu, and 
it was a sort of satisfaction to know that these Massachusetts 
Republicans were under the guidance of an ex-Confederate Mis- 
sourian. Too many of a kind is no good. 

On Lamy, when the sun was low, the passenger train descended 
from the heights of the Glorieta pass, and we journeyed on through 
cliffs, boulders, sand plains, mesas, mountains, and the miscella- 
neous geology of this country, till in the starlight another famous 
river was added to those mine eyes have seen, to wit: the Rio 
Grande. It is a cousin to the Missouri, the Platte and the Ar- 
kansas. Like the latter, it has low banks and a double bottom 
like the Great American Ballot Box used in close districts. It 
is extensively used for irrigation purposes, but apparently loses 
nothing. If all the water were bailed out of it, plenty more 
would rise out of its sands. Rivers of this character are evi- 
dently intended for irrigating purposes, and nothing else. 

At Wallace, where we stopped for supper, was a mixed multi- 
tude. United States people in every variety ; bareheaded Mexican 
women smoking cigarettes; and Indians from a neighboring pu- 
eblo were standing around in their striped blankets and trying 
to sell turquoise and smoked topaz. The town was suffering or 
enjoying an Indian scare. Two or three Apaches had come into 

(68) 



ALBUQUERQUE AND ITS NEIGHBORHOOD. 69 

town, so it was said, and it was expected that they would come 
back with their friends and relatives. To meet the possible 
invaders, a military company had been organized and was march- 
ing about in the dusk, the martial music being extracted from a 
tin pan. The " tame" Indians paid no attention to these warlike 
preparations, and evidently thought that the regular run of the 
turquoise business would not be interfered with by the Apaches. 

Albuquerque was the next point of interest. This town is 
Kansas headquarters, and here the Kansan abroad is at home. 
In Albuquerque it is said the justices of the peace are sworn to 
support the constitution and laws of the State of Kansas. If 
some wandering Kansas politician in search of votes should 
straggle over the line into Albuquerque he would never know the 
difference. 

Albuquerque, like Las Vegas, is two towns, but New Albu- 
querque is newer and Old Albuquerque is older than correspond- 
ing portions of Las Vegas. Las Vegas has a name signifying 
"The Meadows." Albuquerque was named for no less a person 
than the great Duke of Albuquerque, Viceroy of Mexico. In 
point of age, Albuquerque is one of the " way-up" towns, stand- 
ing in the class with Santa Fe. 

One of the pleasures of a trip to New Mexico is the opportu- 
nity afforded to compare the very new with the very old, and I 
have visited no place where this contrast is so sharp as at Albu- 
querque. At Las Vegas there is nothing very old, since the 
Mexican town was not started until 1835; at Santa Fe the new 
and old are somewhat mixed and blended; but at Albuquerque, 
taking the two towns together, you have your comparison clear 
and distinct. In the new town you see the American settlement 
of two years old; in the old town the Spanish settlement of two 
hundred years old. In the new town there is scarcely a Mexican 
house in its original or any other shape; in the old there is 
scarcely an American house. The new town is full of stir; the 
old full of quietness. The new town has every modern improve- 
ment; the old, no change. You take the street cars in the 
new town and you go in a few moments from 1882 to 1668. The 
people, the avocations, the religion even, of the two places are 
5 



70 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

all different. Sin is said to be as old as man and time, but even 
the vices of the new town are those of young communities. The 
new town plays poker with a high hand, and the old sticks to 
monte in the shade. 

Familiar as I am with the growth of towns in the West, I 
have never seen anything so rapid as that of the new town of 
Albuquerque. A town of shanties not unfrequently comes into 
being inside of a couple of years, but very seldom does a town 
spring into existence with daily papers, depots, railroad shops, 
big hotels, large wholesale establishments, gas works and a street 
railway, within the space of twenty-four months. This is, with- 
out exaggeration, what has happened at Albuquerque the younger. 
Of course I availed myself of the opportunity to look at both 
towns. The new town did not require careful inspection. It is 
spread out on broad streets, so much lumber, brick and mortar, 
and more coming; but the old town is a different matter. A 
curious maze of spreading adobe houses, with long, wooden-pil- 
lared porches, is old Albuquerque. It is situated on the banks 
of the Rio Grande, and acequias run all around and all over it. 
The most prominent feature in all Mexican towns is the ditch. 
It has the right of way against everything else. The flowing 
water comes suddenly from under an adobe wall and runs across 
the road and under another wall and out into a field, where it 
divides into a dozen streams, or spreads all around among the 
alfalfa or wheat. The pedestrian on the plaza suddenly encoun- 
ters a stream running across his path. It is the water let on 
above by some unseen party, who is sending the precious fluid to 
gladden his garden half a mile off, or to furnish mud for his 
adobe-making operations. In driving about the country, you 
drive over the all-pervading ditch a dozen times in as many hun- 
dred yards, and the power of water on this, to a Kansas man, 
wretched-looking soil, red as a bummer's nose and full of young 
boulders, is wonderful. The very cottonwood, in this country a 
spreading shade tree, takes on a brighter green. At Albuquerque 
and all along the valley of the Rio Grande are vineyards, planted 
long ago, bearing the Mission grape, introduced by the Francis- 
cans, and said to be, by all New-Mexicans, native and adopted, 



ALBUQUERQUE AND ITS NEIGHBORHOOD. 71 

the finest grape in the world. The vines are not trained on 
walls or trellises, or suffered to run up trees, as in Italy ; they are 
cut back till they give up trying to be vines at all, and turn into 
scrubby, gnarled and knotty bushes. Each bush can be counted 
on for a given number of bunches of grapes. 

While John Price, now liveryman of Albuquerque, New Town, 
formerly of North Topeka, Kansas, was driving me about, we 
visited the Indian school about a mile from the elder Albuquerque. 
The school is primarily a mission establishment of the Presbyte- 
rian church, but it is also a Government boarding school for young 
Indians; the Government of the United States paying $125 per 
annum toward the board, clothing and education of each Indian 
pupil. 

The school has taken possession of a former Mexican farm 
house, one of those rambling affairs which extend over a great 
acre of ground, with rooms enough for a hotel; and here we found 
about forty "little Injuns" under the principalship of Professor 
Shearer, formerly of Concordia, assisted by several ladies ap- 
pointed by the Presbyterian Board. The little Indians were 
recruited at the different pueblos of New Mexico, it being 
thought, perhaps, that the agricultural Indians would take more 
kindly to civilized ways than the children of the wild people. 
So here they were, forty dusky little Indians of unmixed blood, 
for the Pueblos do not intermarry with any other people. They 
were dressed in the clumsy clothes which civilization has imposed 
on us, and which we make it a duty to impose on other people, 
and were being taught the infernal intricacies of English orthog- 
raphy. They sang a hymn, and at my especial request, the bold 
anthem of "Johnny Schmoker." I thought that barbarous 
enough to gratify their native instincts, and make them feel happy. 
Prof. Shearer and his assistants are kind and conscientious, and 
do, I doubt not, all they can for their copper-colored charges; 
but at the risk of being called a heathen man and a publican, I 
will say that the experiment impressed me unfavorably. As a 
Kansas man, I have always been warmly in favor of killing 
Indians, but I do not like to see anybody tormented, and it seems 
to me that is all these Indian-educational experiments amount to. 



72 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

These children speak Spanish : what is the use of teaching them 
English? If they grow up at their native pueblos they will 
plow, and cut wood and sell it, and work after their fashion. 
Why put them in the harness in a manual-labor school? They 
have Indian names. Why change them? They have Indian 
dresses. Why put them into horrid coats and hideous pants? 
It is not natural, and I do not believe it is healthful. I am told 
that the Indian boys sent to Carlisle cannot endure the climate, 
and die off. The same fact is observable elsewhere. I have a 
profound respect for everybody's good intentions, but I do wish 
there was some way to let the Indians alone. I had rather have 
seen one of these little Indian boys dressed in a shirt, or a 
liver pad, or a postage stamp, trotting happy and uncon- 
cerned around his native adobe, and bearing his own Indian 
name, and growing up an IndiaD, than to see him dressed up 
in uncomfortable clothes, with his name changed to Hezekiah 
Jones, and that instrument of torture, an English spelling- 
book in his hand. This may be what, in the language of the 
Pacific-coast humorist, is called a "flowery break," but what 
I have seen has sickened me with our whole system of In- 
dian management. If the whole business could be settled on the 
principle of "you let me alone and I will let you alone," I think 
heaven and earth would have reason to rejoice. 

In this connection I may say that I have been impressed by 
the views of Mr. Bandelier, a scientist, who has lived in Indian 
villages and studied the inhabitants. He says that the Spanish 
in Mexico, after a century or so of persecution and interference, 
finally concluded to let the Indians alone, save that they were 
obliged to accept the Catholic religion. The Indians took as 
much of this religion as they wanted, and let the rest alone. In 
other matters the Indians were left to do as they pleased; govern 
themselves in their villages, preserve their customs, their tribal 
relations, etc. In time, of themselves, they abandoned their 
ancient ways, became citizens, took part in the affairs of the 
country, furnished soldiers and generals for the Mexican army, 
and Benito Juarez, the greatest man Mexico has produced, was 
an Indian of unmixed blood. I do not believe the Mexican 



ALBUQUERQUE AND ITS NEIGHBORHOOD. 73 

Indians differ much in nature from our Indians, yet how differ- 
ent the result in " benighted Mexico," as we are fond of calling 
it, and the United States. We began wrong and have followed 
along with a mixture of treaties and fights, and Bibles and 
whisky, and missionaries and thieves, and fraud and force, and 
annuities and starvation, and we have the cheek all the time to 
call it an "Indian policy." The result is, that the Indian has 
now no fate but death. Put him in school, and he dies of pneu- 
monia or consumption; turn him loose, and he kills himself with 
whisky; put him on a reservation, and he breaks out and kills 
the first man he meets; and after giving a great deal of trouble, 
gets killed himself. This is what the most pious, the most en- 
lightened, the cutest, the smartest, the most ingenious Nation on 
earth does about Indians. 

Among the pleasant incidents of my visit to Albuquerque was 
a trip to Bear canon. It may be stated, in the first place, that 
every modern New-Mexican town has its own mountains or range 
of mountains, and that each mountain or range has its canon or 
canons. The distance from town varies from three to eighteen 
miles; consequently this is the chosen land of picnics. The 
canon always furnishes a resort, and you know it will never rain 
till July. A sort of picnic was the gathering in the Bear canon, 
twelve miles from Albuquerque. 

The party consisted of Mr. W. S. Burke, formerly of the 
Leavenworth Times; Capt. George E. Beates, of Junction City, 
now employed on Government surveys in Arizona; Mr. Whit- 
ney; a driver, name unknown; the writer; and an old prospector, 
who, naturally gifted in that direction, has developed by practice 
into the most enormous liar in the Territory of New Mexico. It 
was up hill all the way across the dry sloping prairie that 
stretches to the foot of the Sandias, but I think he gave us a lie 
for each revolution of the wagon wheels. Being quite deaf, he 
could not hear the glowing falsehoods which were returned him 
as a sort of small change for his tremendous fabrications, but he 
was very, very happy as it was. His object was to show us in- 
dications of mineral he had discovered in the canon, but his 
labor was in vain. After our experience on the way up, he might 



74 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

have tumbled into a two-foot streak of twenty-dollar gold pieces, 
and we would not have believed in him. 

The canon, to return to the object of the excursion, was found 
a beautiful spot; a winding cleft amid enormous piles of rock 
massed in every fantastic shape, and finally solidifying into per- 
pendicular cliffs. A mountain stream clear as crystal flowed 
over a bed of shining gravel, but utterly disappeared in the 
sands within a hundred yards from the mouth of the canon. So 
the little stream goes on day and night, year after year, with its 
fruitless labors, gathering the melted snow from the mountain- 
top — gathering from each spring along its way, only to pour its 
flood at last upon the evil and unthankful desert of the plain. 



SOCORRO. 



At Albuquerque the matter of mining stares you in the face, 
and you are obliged to confront the question whether you are a 
miner, a prospector, or a mining broker ; whether you have mines 
to buy or mines to sell ; in short, to decide whether you have any 
past, present or future interests in mines. 

For myself, I have no earthly interest in any mine or mines, 
and unless the knowledge is acquired on the present journey I 
shall never really^know anything about mines. This ignorance 
I enjoy in common with a vast number of my fellow-citizens who 
pretend to know more. There is no subject on which more notes 
of talk are issued on a small paid-up capital of knowledge than 
this question of mining. As some of the most inveterate gam- 
blers I have ever known were men who had no skill at cards 
and never could acquire any, so these mountains and mesas are 
full of men talking about carbonates and chlorides and sulphur- 
ets, and spending their own money, but more frequently the 
money of other people who have no practical knowledge of mines 
or mining, and whose words and opinions are of no more value 
than the gentle warblings of a burro. From such it is of course 
useless to seek information, and yet they are the men who pre- 
sume to instruct the "tender-foot," as they call the man who has 
arrived in the country two weeks later than themselves. 

At Albuquerque I was a-weary of the talk about prospects 
and "good indications" and assays, and all that, and went to 
Socorro to see a mine in active operation and sending ore to the 
smelter or stamp mill. 

The journey from Albuquerque to Socorro was made in the 
night, and no note can be made of the scenery along the road. 
Socorro was seen for the first time in the early light of the next 
morning. 

(75) 



76 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

Socorro is a Spanish word, signifying "succor." It is said to 
derive its name from the fact that the fugitives from Santa Fe, 
driven out by the Indians in 1680, here received help from their 
countrymen at El Paso. The story as told now is that the Span- 
iards were shut up in a pueblo at or near the present site of 
Socorro, and that a messenger jumped down a rock 200 feet high, 
spreading out his coat tail and using it as a parachute, and so 
reaching the ground in safety, made his way to El Paso and re- 
turned with help. The story of the jump I do not believe by 
several feet, nor do I believe it is of native origin. It sounds 
like a story invented in front of the old Tefft House in Topeka, 
and enlarged by the effects of the New- Mexican climate. How- 
ever, whether the story of Socorro is true or not, the town is here; 
a good-looking Mexican town to begin with, with a sort of double 
plaza and an adobe church of great antiquity and extreme ugli- 
ness. The American town is joined on to the Mexican town, and 
will probably inclose it in time. I have not seen in the suburbs 
of any other New-Mexican town so many pleasant homes. The 
irrigating business is carried on extensively, as at old Albuquer- 
que, and surrounding the town is the same maze of narrow lanes 
with high adobe walls. Many cottonwoods and other trees flour- 
ish along the banks of the acequias. One lane and one tree has 
a history. Up this lane the vigilantes were accustomed to march 
gentlemen who were no longer useful nor ornamental in society, 
and on this gentle and unpretending cottonwood, with a limb 
projecting over the dusty lane, they were hung, the top of the 
garden wall serving as the platform of the scaffold. This severe 
treatment was so efficacious that it is no longer needful, and the 
last parties to a "hold-up" were only horse-whipped and com- 
pelled to leave the town. These little episodes are unpleasant, 
but they serve to decide whether a town shall be ruled by its 
roughs or its better element. 

It must not be understood, however, that courts and the judi- 
cial ermine, and the scales of justice, do not exist in New Mexico. 
I saw the United States court in session at old Albuquerque. 
The hall of justice was in a low-ceiled room in an adobe building 
near the plaza. Two lawyers were enlightening the court on the 



SOCORRO. 77 

subject of deeds. The jury, composed of Mexicans, did not 
understand a word of it all, and looked as stupid and miserable 
as the average American jury. His Honor, a newly-arrived 
New-Yorker, seemed to have a pained and apprehensive look; 
perhaps, however, he was only trying to look judicial. There 
was a crowd of lawyers. They were as thick as fiddlers in a 
place formerly much talked about. It is needless to say that an 
attorney from Larned, Kansas, sat in the midst. The whole 
scene was as tiresome as a district court in the United States. It 
is well; if people will have civilization and enlightenment, let 
them take the consequences. 

Socorro boasts one of the few stamp mills and smelters in this 
part of New Mexico. From the multiplicity of mines and min- 
ing companies one would suppose these structures would be as 
common as school houses in Kansas. They are not, however. 
A stamp mill is a mill whose ground grist is silver, with which 
you can buy anything, except an interest in the kingdom of 
heaven; A stamp mill, therefore, seen for the first time, is a 
matter worthy of inspection. 

The stamp mill at Socorro is an average structure of the kind, 
I suppose. It cost more than it ought to, owing to a variety of 
untoward circumstances. The gentleman who showed me over 
it said that such a mill, under favorable conditions, could be built 
for $45,000. A stamp mill is in appearance very much like a 
coal breaker — a high, raw-boned affair, with an inclined railway 
up which the ore, which looks like red dust and broken sand- 
stone, is hauled in little iron cars. Once at the top of the house, 
the ore is fed from a hopper into a sort of iron jaw, which cracks 
it, and then water is introduced and it goes down under the 
stamps. These stamps are pillars, or rather pestles, of chilled 
iron, which are lifted and dropped by a cam movement, which at 
the same time gives them a rotary motion. Every Yankee boy 
who has ever "pounded out corn" in a barrel can understand the 
operation. The pounding process is the most natural, and is su- 
perior to any grinding machinery. The ore reduced to a powder 
with water, drops down into various tanks and is subjected to the 
action of salt and hot water, which effects chloridization, what- 



78 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

ever that is, and finally the junction of the silver with quick- 
silver is effected. This mass of silver and quicksilver is retorted, 
i. e., it is heated in a retort; the quicksilver is vaporized and passes 
over to be condensed and saved with very little waste, and the 
silver remains. This is the amalgamation process which every- 
body in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and California 
knows all about, but of which thousands of people in Kansas 
have no adequate conception. This process seems very compli- 
cated and scientific, but it was practiced in this country by the 
Spaniards centuries ago. With their rude machinery they did 
not do as much in a given time as we do, but our processes are in 
substance the same. Col. George Noble, formerly of the Kansas 
Pacific, who has looked at many old Spanish mines, says no ore 
is found in the waste. They dug out all the ore and carried it 
"clear away." They evidently knew all about mining. 

The smelter was not running, and so I can tell nothing of the 
operations. When I get farther along in my education I will 
describe it. There is a distinction between ores, some requiring 
the amalgamation process ; others the smelting. I am not " way 
up" enough yet in the business to describe the difference. The 
stamp mill at Socorro is employed exclusively on the ore from 
the Torrence mine, of which more further on. 

Back of Socorro, if a town can be said to have a back, and 
three miles away, rises a high-shouldered eminence, not so sharp 
and flinty as most New-Mexican mountains, called Socorro 
Mountain, and from it comes silver and warm water. Through 
the kindness of Mr. Walker, formerly of Holton, Kansas, we 
were furnished a conveyance, and Dr. Lapham, of Socorro, as a 
guide. We journeyed along over a plain covered with yellow 
flowers, a sort of Mexican cross between a buttercup and a dan- 
delion, and kept close to an acequia filled with warm water. This 
stream, conveyed in troughs, turns the high, narrow overshot 
wheels of no less than three little grist mills, which formerly 
ground a good deal of wheat raised by the Mexicans in the Rio 
Grande valley. A hot-water mill can count for a novelty. The 
spring was reached at the foot of the mountain, or a low-lying 
spur of it. The water comes out of a cleft in the rocks, and 



SOCORRO. 79 

forms a pool fifty feet long by twenty-five wide. The water is so 
clear that the atmosphere forms the only comparison. The water 
is not hot, but warm. A red crag rises perpendicularly from the 
water. A visitor usually says: "I think this rock is volcanic in 
its origin." In this case it is in order for some other visitor to 
say: "You are quite mistaken; it is sedimentary." How impos- 
ing are these discussions in which neither party knows anything 
about the question. 

Whether the heat of the spring is due to volcanic or chemical 
action, it is a great blessing to Socorro. It has uncommon 
cleansing properties, both for people and shirts; it turns grist 
mills, waters gardens, and is occasionally drunk with other sub- 
stances, which in their effect confirm the volcanic theory. 

Our guide proved most entertaining and instructive, and after 
pointing out the beauty and usefulness of the spring, we went on 
to the "front and center" of the mountain, to the Torrence mine. 

The mouth of the mine is covered by a building a hundred 
yards from the base. A silver mine is a clean mine; there is 
nothing black about it. It is all white or red dust of unknown 
depth, and piles of ore and waste. The first thing that strikes 
the observer at the Torrence is the solid finish and apparent cost 
of everything. The engine, the buildings, the wire cables, all 
spoke of money spent. 

Under the guidance of Mr. Newton, the superintendent, we 
went down the slope into the mine. The entrance, like all the 
rest of the mine, is planked on the sides and overhead. It was 
like a long box. When we reached the bottom of the slope, 
which was done by means of steps, we had descended 203 feet. 

The ore in the Torrence lies in a stratum tipped up at an angle 
of forty-five degrees. Consequently, galleries are run in at dif- 
ferent levels, the main gallery being the lowest. Then the miner 
follows the vein upward along the incline, and this is called 
"stoping." Occasionally the vein "swells" — that is, becomes 
wider — and sometimes it "pinches." But wherever it goes the 
miner follows it as a ferret follows a rat. If it goes down, he 
goes down, and if it goes up, he climbs the slopes. If he loses it, 
he finds it again. Wherever that red-and-white streak goes, 



80 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

there he goes. It seemed strange, that eager and toilsome bur- 
rowing down in the depths of the earth after a few pounds of 
shining metal which few of us can get hold of after all. 

The mine was perfectly free from water or even dampness. 
New Mexico must be dry clear to the bottom. The hill in which 
the mine is situated seems a pile of loose rocks — the walls broke 
down easily before the pick. But this easy digging makes tim- 
bering necessary, and a great amount of native lumber has been 
used up. 

There are now about one hundred men in the mine. Those 
addressed were Americans and bright men, who spoke as if they 
could own a mine if they wished. In fact, many of them are 
prospectors who have gone below ground to raise a stake, and 
when they have got another start will continue their quest for a 
mine which shall make them rich in a minute. 

But while we are talking about mines, all the stories pale be- 
fore those told of the Lake Valley group — stories of ore so fine 
that a lighted candle will melt the lead and leave pure silver; 
stories of offers of $50,000 for the ore one man could dig out in 
six hours; stories of the Bridal Chamber, lined with silver and 
lead so that a pick driven into the wall sticks as if driven into a 
mass of putty. And they say these mines are owned by Quakers 
in Philadelphia. So goes luck in this world: while hundreds of 
miners, experts, gamblers, speculators, etc., are charging wildly 
over the country, betting and losing, these sleek Quakers come in 
for the fattest silver mine in creation. It is all so wonderful that 
I shall make an effort to go to Lake Valley. 

Dr. L., without making pretensions to being an antiquarian, 
has visited many places of antiquity in New Mexico, and among 
them a point sixty miles from Socorro known as Gran Quivira. 
Here are the remains, now utterly deserted, of a very large 
town. It is now fifteen miles from water, yet there are traces of 
ditches. This town has a ruined church, and this was the Qui- 
vira of Coronado. At the risk of being no longer allowed to 
live in Kansas, I must say that nobody in New Mexico believes 
that Coronado ever visited Kansas. This is humiliating, partic- 
ularly since Major Inman has marched him directly to the bluff 



SOCORRO. 81 

of South Fourth street, Atchison, on which Senator Ingalls's 
residence is at present located. The claim has been insisted on 
because Coronado describes his meeting with the buffalo ; but those 
beasts have, within the memory of living man, been seen within 
twenty miles of Albuquerque. I am afraid Coronado as a Kan- 
sas explorer is a myth. It is a consolation to know, however, 
that if he failed to discover Kansas plenty of better men have 
found it. 



A GLIMPSE OF MEXICO. 



The train leaving Socorro for the southwest at one o'clock in 
the morning crosses the famous Jornada del Muerto before it is 
daylight, consequently I did not see the desolate region made 
familiar to Kansas readers by one of "Deane Monahan's" strik- 
ing sketches. But I may say here, that where I have had the 
opportunity for observation, I have had occasion to testify to the 
charming fidelity of our Kansas writer to every detail of New- 
Mexican life and scenery. 

Shortly after leaving the borders of the Jornada, we entered 
upon what a fellow-passenger assured me was the "Garden of 
New Mexico." He referred to the borders of the Rio Grande, in 
which are located the vineyards and orchards of Las Cruces. 
But for the railroad, it is evidently "over the garden wall," run- 
ning through a land devoted to rocks, soap-weed and cactus, the 
most prominent of the hundred or so varieties of the latter being 
what a friend calls the "broom-handle" species, which throws up 
its leafless arms like a devil-fish, and at the end of each bears a 
single brilliant scarlet flower. 

Fort Selden, standing in a wilderness, I took for an abandoned 
adobe, when several blue-coats made their appearance amid the 
roofless walls. The post has been reoccupied by a portion of the 
large force now concentrating in this region to chase a few score 
Indians. The next military establishment passed was a neat 
little post, Fort Bliss. Here was an immense pile of the roots 
of the mesquite, used for fuel, for here, as an " old residenter " 
remarks, you climb for water and dig for wood. 

Here was El Paso, " The Pass," where the Rio Grande breaks 
through a rocky barrier ; where the Atchison, Topeka & Santa 
Fe crowds by with it; and once through it you are at the north- 
ern gate of Mexico. The Spaniards long ago recognized this 

(82) 



A GLIMPSE OP MEXICO. 83 

fact, and named their town El Paso del Norte — the Pass of the 
North. The Americans caught at the idea, and re-named an old 
Texas town El Paso also. 

This tawny town is the dividing line between two Nations. 
That low shore beyond the swift yellow stream is Mexico, a for- 
eign land. Mexico: the name was associated with some of my 
earliest recollections. The "Mexican war," a great war until it 
and all our other wars were lost in a mightier struggle, began with 
the first link of the continuous chain of my memory. What 
heroes they were — Taylor and Scott, and Ringgold with his flying 
artillery, and Capt. May with his dragoons. How Capt. May 
used to "show up" in the pictures, ridiug over the Mexican guns 
and the green-coated cannoneers; and how colossal we thought 
the battles, Resaca de la Palma, and Palo Alto, and Molino del 
Rey, and Buena Vista. We remember, now, only that certain 
great generals were lieutenants in those battles. Notwithstand- 
ing all that, the impressions of childhood are hard to overcome, 
and Mexico has always been to me a land of interest, a land to 
be visited sometime — and here at last was Mexico. 

The American town of El Paso, although a growing place, the 
junction of the Southern Pacific, Texas Pacific, and Atchison, 
Topeka & Santa Fe roads, failed for the time to interest me, 
even though I found at the Grand Central my old friend Col. 
George Noble, who sat up with the Kansas Pacific in its infancy, 
but has now retired from railroading and is devoted to town lots 
and mines, with, the neighbors say, satisfactory financial results. 
I crossed the river at the first opportunity, and stood on the soil 
of Mexico. A young Mexican with a revolver and cartridge- 
belt, who said "Bueno," as the carriage went off the ferry-boat, 
was the only evidence of a foreign national sovereignty. 

The American Consul in Paso del Norte is Mr. Richardson, 
but the American official most visited by his fellow-countrymen 
is Governor George T. Anthony, Superintendent of the Mexican 
Central Railroad. He was found in his office, looking much the 
same as when he transacted business in the southeast corner of 
the capitol at Topeka, save perhaps a trifle older from passing 
years and much hard work. 



84 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

This at last was a genuine Mexican town, still sporting the 
cactus and the eagle; no New Mexico affair, subjected to thirty- 
six years of the rule of the "Estados Unidos del Norte/' as I saw 
it on a Mexican map. Well, hardly; for in going up the street 
I saw the sign "The Little Church Around the Corner;" the 
American rum mill had crossed the frontier. Still it was Mexi- 
can. Dark faces, two-story huts with a piazza all around, and 
women sitting flat on the narrow bulkheads, made of •'cobbles," 
were the rule, and fair faces and a swinging gait the exception. 
The streets were narrow, almost deserted by wheeled carriages, 
with the interminable wall of adobe, white plastered houses 
stretching away on either side, and fairly shining in the sun. It 
was so still; so unlike the Texas town on the other side; so un- 
like anything under the American heaven. Of course there was 
the church, plastered to shining whiteness on the outside, much 
more imposing than the churches in New Mexico, which stand 
unadorned but not beautiful in their native mud color. Having 
read "The Priest of El Paso," we went to see him. He was found 
to be an old man, very seedily dressed in what soldiers call "citi- 
zens" clothes; he put on a surplice and went to the church door 
with his sacristan, a Mexican in jacket, and with the heaviest 
and blackest hair I ever saw, and baptized the little baby of a 
humble Mexican couple. There was a look of feeble melancholy 
in the priest's face, which seemed to tell the truth that in Mexico 
the church has fallen upon evil days. The laborer, however, is 
worthy of his hire, and fortunately in this case the hire is fixed, 
for I saw on the wall the printed permit of the Archbishop of 
Obispo, giving the fees to be charged for clerical services ; for 
baptism so much, for funerals so much, and so on to the end of 
the chapter. 

Near the church was a little half-ruined plaza. There was a 
low, circular wall in the center, which had sometime perhaps in- 
closed a fountain; there were stone seats all around, and two 
rows of trees and little ditches, or grooves rather, to allow the 
water to run over their roots and keep them green. I dare say 
that under the tyrannical rule of the Spanish Viceroys the people, 
young and old, gathered in the plaza of an evening and were 



A GLIMPSE OF MEXICO. 85 

happy; but with freedom came eternal revolution, and the pleas- 
ure ground fell into decay. Perhaps the Yankee will come and 
worship his god, Politics, in this plaza, to the sound of trombones 
and bass tubas, and clarionets and ward orators and other wind 
instruments. 

On Thursday evening we rode in and around the town, and 
Gov. Anthony pointed out the new depot of the Mexican Cen- 
tral, which is to be a fine house, built of adobes with a placita, 
with all the offices opening into it; and there was also a new 
freight house, in the construction of which the lumber of half a 
dozen States had been employed, California furnishing the red- 
wood shingles. Then there were the big locomotives named for 
the Mexican States, the " Zacatecas," the "Jalisco," and the 
others. 

The common Mexican does not seem at home in towns, nor is 
he a success as a town-builder, but give him a little plot of 
ground and an acequeia, and he will give the American author 
of "Ten Acres Enough" half a dozen points, and beat him. 
How pleasant it all was : the gardens and the big pear trees, and 
the vineyards, and the little squares of purple alfalfa, and all 
the people out of doors and at work, for the water is let into the 
little ditches at sunset. It was a picture of quiet and content- 
ment, though boisterous happiness appears unknown in this 
country. There is a subdued look about all animate creatures, 
even to the plump, olive-skinned children, who look at you fix- 
edly with unblinking round black eyes as you pass. 

From this evening scene a feature of every Mexican landscape 
should not be omitted, to wit, the goats, who come in a compact 
mass, brown and yellow and spotted, down the dusty lane, at- 
tended by their swarthy and ragged herdsman. Mexico would 
not be Mexico without the burros, the curs of low degree, and 
the goats. These are indispensable. 

Returning to the Texas El Paso after the drive, we left it again 
in the early light of the next (Friday) morning for Chihuahua 
via the Central Mexican Railroad as far as Ojo-Laguna, the end of 
the track, and thence by the company's ambulance to the objec- 
tive point. We started from the " Santa Fe" depot, the track of 
6 



86 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

the A. T. & S. F. connecting with the Mexican Central in the 
center of the bridge across the Rio Grande. The Mexican shore 
reached, we sped along on our journey southwest. The road 
runs almost in a straight line south, and has a maximum grade 
of only thirty-five feet to the mile. The route seems designed 
by nature for a railroad. It is, for the most part, a level plain ; 
to the left what may be termed a range of high hills; to the right 
a range of low mountains, the order being occasionally changed. 
The ranges are broken into groups, bearing different names, the 
most noticeable being the Candelarias, or Candle Mountains, so 
called from the signal fires of the Indians, frequently seen flash- 
ing upon the peaks at night. As the road proceeds southward 
the country grows less sandy, till at the plains of Encinillas it 
may be called a fair prairie. All the streams in Northern Chi- 
huahua empty into lakes, or lagunas, which have no visible out- 
let. At the largest one of these, Ojo-Laguna, we found the 
boarding-train and the ambulance; the track is laid three or four 
miles farther, and the grading is completed to Chihuahua. 

At the boarding-train was found a large party, mostly Ameri- 
cans, though a few slender Mexicans in serapes and sandals 
served to form a contrast with the burly and bearded men of the 
North. Dinner eaten, we started with our four-mule ambulance 
to cover the sixty miles that lay between us and Chihuahua. 

The road for the most part was an excellent one, but it trav- 
erses a solitude for many miles. Over all the country has rested 
the shadow of constant danger. For in the canons in the moun- 
tains has lurked the merciless Apache, ready at some unexpected 
moment to rush or steal out on his errand of plunder or murder. 
Every mile was marked by some story of his cruelty. But his 
hour has come; the Mexican, after a century of suffering, has at 
last driven his enemy to bay, and hunts him to death in his moun- 
tain fastnesses. Our own troops are powerless in face of the res- 
ervation system, which offers murderers and robbers a safe asylum. 
In Mexico there are no reservations. 

The country we were traversing is a vast cattle range, occupied 
by the herds of Governor Terassas, of Chihuahua, who claims an 
immense region. The cattle could be seen far and near, and oc- 



A GLIMPSE OF MEXICO. 87 

casionally a herd crossed the road ; a bull in the advance, whose 
high head and long sharp horns recalled the pictures of Spanish 
bull fights; then came the gaunt black-and-white, dun-and-yel- 
low cows, with their calves by their sides. In thirty miles we 
saw but three inhabited places; and one of them, the ranch of 
Encinillas, with its little church, lay miles away under the 
shadow of the mountain. We passed near the two others. They 
were virtually forts of adobe, each with its round tower pierced 
with loop-holes ; near each was a corral made of bush, or poles 
fastened to the cross-pieces with thongs of rawhide. A solitary 
door afforded admission to the placita; the long line of outer 
walls showed no openings in the way of windows. Everything 
of value — wool, hides, wheat — is kept inside the walls. It has 
been so long a land of perpetual danger and watchfulness. 

As darkness drew on we saw across the plain the four white 
tents of the engineer party, and drove over there for supper. 
The boys were found in comfortable condition, and interested in 
their few Mexican neighbors. They told some curious stories 
of the effects of the yerba lota, or mad-weed, which grows in 
these plains. Two of their mules having eaten it went absolutely 
crazy, and suffered from swelled heads the next morning ; yet, 
having eaten it once, eagerly sought for it again. The weed ap- 
pears to operate on mules as whisky does on men. I was sorry 
to hear of the existence of such a plant ; an inebriated mule 
around a camp must be a terrible calamity. 

The cloudy night had settled down when we resumed our soli- 
tary way. There was no sound except the clatter of the hoofs 
of our mules and the crunching of the wheels in the gravel. A 
barking of dogs heralded our approach to the few houses called 
Sacramento, where there was once a show of fight between our 
troops and the Mexicans in the old "Mexican war;" then all was 
still again for miles and miles. Then we saw a light; at times it 
seemed directly in front; then it appeared on one side or the 
other; now we are bearing down upon it; it is at the end of a 
long, straight avenue ; we shall reach it presently ; no, it is re- 
ceding; perhaps it is but a star; no, here it is again. So with 
weary eyes we watched the light. Now it shines, clear and well 



88 



SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 



defined. It is a street lamp ; it throws its gleam on the front of 
some buildings. We pass under the over-hanging boughs of 
trees; we rattle over a stone bridge; the blank walls of houses 
arise, white, ghostly, vague, on either hand in the light of lamps 
few and far between. The sharp cry of a sentry comes out of 
the dark, "Quien vive?" " Amigos" is the reply, and we pass 
on. Here is an open space; lamps gleam through trees and 
shrubbery ; high up between the towers of a church shines an 
illuminated clock face; the brazen clangor of a bell drops down 
from the height; it is 3 o'clock in the morning, and this is the 
plaza of Chihuahua. 



SOMETHING ABOUT CHIHUAHUA. 



The city of Chihuahua, which in a few weeks will be as access- 
ible to the people of the United States as New York and Phila- 
delphia, is situated 224 miles, by rail, south of El Paso, Texas, 
and 900 miles north of the City of Mexico, with which it will 
be connected by rail within two years. 

It is the largest city in the extreme Northern Mexico, has had 
a brilliant past, and seems destined to a prosperous future. It 
will be visited within the next twelve months by thousands of 
Western people — including a large proportion of Kansans — 
drawn by business, pleasure, and curiosity. 

Chihuahua is the capital of the State of Chihuahua, the north- 
eastern State of the Republic of Mexico; it is the seat of justice 
for the county of Iturbide, and the military headquarters of the 
department at present commanded by Gen. Fuero. It is the site 
of a Government mint, and generally the political and commer- 
cial capital of the North. It is the first point reached by the 
great Mexican Central Railway, (an extension of the Atchison, 
Topeka & Santa Fe system,) and no city of importance will ever 
be built within two hundred miles of it in any direction. 

Chihuahua has a municipal government, the present mayor 
being Don Juan N. ZubiraD, for many years the Mexican consul 
at El Paso, Texas, and one of the most progressive of the public 
men of Mexico. He speaks and writes English with fluency, 
and is the friend of every respectable American who comes to 
Chihuahua. He is an encyclopedia of Mexican history and pol- 
itics; has known every Mexican political or military chief of 
prominence from the days of Santa Anna, and was the devoted 
personal friend of the late President Juarez. Kindly, affable, a 
friend of popular education, he has laid the city of Chihuahua 

(89) 



90 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

under everlasting obligations, and is the creditor of a large num- 
ber of foreigners for information extended. 

Chihuahua is well paved, has waterworks of an ancient pattern, 
and is lighted with naptha lamps; it has several hotels, mostly 
frequented by Americans; two American barber shops, and one 
bootblack of native origin. It has banks, stores of all kinds, a 
theater, & plaza de toros, from which the bulls and matadors have 
however departed, and which is occupied at present by a Mexi- 
can circus company, which performs every Sunday. The clown 
speaks Spanish, and is therefore unable to bore Americans. 

Historically, Chihuahua may be said to be a comparatively 
modern place, for a Spanish-American city. It lays no such 
claim to antiquity as Santa Fe or several other towns in New 
Mexico. It was in fact as Senor Zubiran says, "nothing but 
grasshoppers," until 1702, when the great silver mine of Santa 
Eulalia attracted attention to the neighborhood. The town grew 
after the fashion of mining towns in other times and centuries, 
and in 1718, by royal authority, the settlement was organized as 
a village, under the name of San Francisco de Chihuahua. The 
immense richness of the mines, the fact that there was no other 
town of importance within hundreds of miles, and the wealth and 
energy of its inhabitants, combined to make Chihuahua a marvel 
of prosperity. Other colonies and towns were the outgrowth of 
missions, and were located on the site of Indian pueblos. Chi- 
huahua sprang into existence under the shadow of its mountain, 
El Coronel ("The Colonel"), the product of mining and com- 
merce. When Capt. Zebulon M. Pike was detained here a pris- 
oner in 1806, he found a fine city of 60,000 people. It is well 
authenticated that in the middle of the last century the town had 
70,000 inhabitants. Its rulers were merchants and mine owners. 
It was also a manufacturing town, and within the last fifty years 
articles from the State of Chihuahua were sold in great quantities 
at Santa Fe. 

The era of greatest prosperity was probably reached about 
1727, when the great church on the plaza, called the Cathedral — 
but which it is not, as Chihuahua has not and never has had a 



SOMETHING ABOUT CHIHUAHUA. 91 

bishop — was commenced. It was built as the parish church of 
Chihuahua by the business men of the city, out of a fund raised 
by a contribution of 12J cents on each mark, or eight ounces, of 
silver produced in the vicinity. Commenced in 1727, the ex- 
terior was completed in 1741; the interior was not finished till 
1761. The building proper cost $600,000 ; of the cost of the 
interior no one presumes to make an estimate. In those days 
the banks of the little river Chuvisca, which flows by the town, 
were lined with smelters and reduction works, and immense 
piles of waste can still be traced for miles. Outside of the pres- 
ent city the foundations of ancient houses can be traced, scattered 
over a large district. Here was a great city, enormous in its 
wealth, with its fine Alameda thronged with pleasure-seekers 
every morning and evening, and yet as utterly shut out from 
every foreign country as if it had been situated in the interior 
of Africa. The Spanish erected a more than Chinese wall about 
the country. Within a few years it has required two months 
for a letter to reach Chihuahua from the United States. 

When the decline of Chihuahua began, is hard to state; proba- 
bly with the abandonment of the policy of enslaving the Indians 
and working them in the mines. The staggering blow was dealt 
by the Mexican revolution, which lasted from 1810 to 1821. 
This eleven years of war was followed by the years of perpetual 
revolution, which have now happily ended. The Spaniard 
worked no mines except by slave labor; now comes the Ameri- 
can with his mighty slave, steam, which performs the work of 
millions of bondmen, and the restoration of Mexico and of 
Chihuahua is at hand. After all the backsets and calamities, 
the town is still estimated to contain 19,000 people. Most of its 
public buildings have survived the shocks of time and revolu- 
tion. 

Chihuahua, nine hundred miles from the City of Mexico, the 
political center, has yet had its share in the wars of the country. 
The people bore an honorable part in the struggle for independ- 
ence, and in this city occurred the saddest tragedy of the revo- 
lution, the murder of Hidalgo. Amid all the bitter contentions 
of Mexican politics, no voice has ever been raised against the 



92 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

character of Hidalgo. A scholar and a priest, he first distin- 
guished himself by his efforts in behalf of his parishioners; he 
introduced among them the silk-worm and the honey-bee. Al- 
though allied by his profession and his family to the ruling 
class, he yet raised in the face of what seemed resistless power 
the standard of revolt. He foretold his own fate, saying that it 
was the fortune of men who inaugurated revolutions to perish in 
them. After the disastrous battle of the Bridge of Calderon, 
Hidalgo was captured and brought to Chihuahua, where he was 
shot within the walls of the Hospital Real. He died with the 
utmost resolution; giving his gold watch to the jailer, and divid- 
ing what coin he had about his person among the firing party, 
to whom he said: "I will place my hand upon my breast; it 
will serve as the mark at which you are to fire." The hospital 
has been nearly all torn down to make room for a new govern- 
ment building now in course of erection. A monument has 
been erected near the spot of his execution, but it bears no in- 
scription; no carved word or line is needed to remind Mexicans 
that here died the purest and most unselfish man whose name 
has yet adorned the annals of Mexico. His head is engraved 
on the postal stamps of the country, and on the walls of the 
council chamber of Chihuahua hangs his portrait, with those of 
Morelos, Guerrero, Juarez, and General Mejia, Minister of War 
to the latter. It is sad but true that in the long line of public 
men who have figured in Mexico the names of Hidalgo and 
Juarez alone seem to receive universal veneration. Hidalgo 
died with his work hardly begun, but Juarez lived to see his 
country freed from the invader, and every substantial reform 
now doing its beneficent work in Mexico is the result of his 
labors and counsels. 

During the invasion of the French, Juarez, driven from his 
capital, resided for a year in Chihuahua. Congress had delegated 
all its powers to him. He was the government. The French 
twice occupied Chihuahua; the second time they were driven 
out. At one time so desperate were the fortunes of the Republic 
that Juarez took refuge in Paso del Norte, but he never aban- 
doned Mexican territory. During his stay at El Paso the ex- 



SOMETHING ABOUT CHIHUAHUA. 93 

penses of the government are said to have been thirty dollars a 
day, a sum which was contributed by the citizens of Chihuahua. 

Chihuahua has had two revolutions, but appears to have been 
fairly governed except during the reign of a drunken vagabond, 
Gen. Angel Trias, who destroyed one of the finest churches in 
the city and committed other depredations. The present Gov- 
ernor, Don Luis Terassas, has been in power a long time, and is 
said to be liberal in his views. His brother, Col. Terassas, distin- 
guished himself in the destruction of Victorio and his murdering 
Indians. 

Chihuahua is to some extent an adobe town, but the public 
buildings and principal edifices are built in a great measure of a 
stone obtained from a quarry three miles from town, which in 
texture resembles the magnesian limestone found in Kansas, but 
in color somewhat resembles the Caen stone so much used for 
building in Paris. 

The society in Chihuahua is at present largely Mexican. There 
are a few foreigners who have long been domiciled here, have in- 
termarried with Mexican families, and have exercised a great in- 
fluence. 

Henrique Muller, a German, was for many years a ruler in 
Chihuahua. The family of Macraanus, originally from Carlisle, 
Pennsylvania, has been in Chihuahua for forty years, and the 
second generation is now in business here. Many people antici- 
pate a complete revolution, social and otherwise, with the coming 
of the Mexican Central Railroad, but what I have seen of the 
survival of the Mexican habits and customs in New Mexico, 
after over thirty years of American rule, leads me to think that 
it will be several years before Chihuahua ceases to be to Ameri- 
cans a foreign city in many things. 

The altitude of Chihuahua counteracts the latitude. Here, in 
the last quarter of May, the weather is like the June of Kansas, with 
a few hours of July in the middle of the day. There is nothing 
in the atmosphere or the vegetation to suggest an extreme south- 
ern, much less tropical, climate. The flowers here are the lark- 
spurs and hollyhocks and roses, the coramm garden flowers of 
New England. This all changes, however, in the rainy season. 



94 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

Kansas people who are not in a hurry will enjoy a visit to 
Chihuahua, merely as a visit. If they are on business intent, 
and wish to rush things, they had better leave the city and go to 
prospecting. In Chihuahua as far as I have observed no one is 
in a hurry. I have never seen a town with such facilities for 
sitting down. There are seats on the plaza, seats all along the 
Alameda, and stone benches on all the placitas. These are not 
at all necessary for the ordinary Mexican, male or female, for he 
or she takes a seat on the sidewalk whenever repose is required. 
The American out of a job travels incessantly; even the profes- 
sional loafer moves or tramps; but the Mexican, when there is 
nothing urgent on hand, takes a seat. Americans must make up 
their minds to this, and not get excited, since it will effect nothing. 

The people of Chihuahua, as far as my observation goes, and 
as far as I can learn from others, are extremely civil. The rowdy 
and the hoodlum do not seem to be native to Chihuahua. The 
men do not carry knives and daggers, nor do they stick them in 
the backs of Americans, as commonly represented. The vices of 
the Mexican character, of which we hear so much, appear to be 
carefully concealed, as far as strangers are concerned. In a some- 
what extensive acquaintance with public grounds in various cities 
and countries, I have never known a more orderly, perhaps it 
would better to say, courteous place, than the plaza in Chihua- 
hua at night. 

Whether an American can enjoy himself as a mere looker-on 
here, depends on his temperament. If he is easy-going, tolerant, 
willing to submit to a state of things different from that existing 
at Jonesville Four Corners, U. S. A ; if he is curious about an 
ancient civilization, different from our own ; if he wishes to see a 
Southern European city without crossing the ocean, he will find 
it in Chihuahua. 



RECOLLECTIONS OF CHIHUAHUA. 



The center of Chihuahua is the plaza. There is a ruiued por- 
tion of the town called "Old Chihuahua," but it is certain that 
this plaza is as old as anything in the city. It is now, as it al- 
ways has been, the joy and pride of the town, this little square 
of green. In appearance it is somewhat modernized; it was 
originally planted in orange trees, which were killed some years 
ago by the frost, and handsome young ash trees now fill their 
places. There are beds of common garden flowers, larkspurs, 
hollyhocks, petunias, verbenas and the like, trellises covered with 
vines, and in the center there is a bronze fountain, which sup- 
plies the place of an antique stone-work. The aqueduct, a very 
ancient construction, is out of order, yet the bronze swans of the 
fountain pour out little streams from their bills, and keep up a 
continual splashing, and partially fill the basin. From the ear- 
liest light of morning till far into the night a crowd of women 
and girls are coming to or going from the fountain with earthen 
jars, such as you see in pictures of "Rebecca at the Well;" 
there are also porters, who carry away little barrels of water 
slung on a pole between them. Whatever stillness may linger 
around the rest of Chihuahua, it is always busy about the foun- 
tain. There are seats of bronzed iron around the plaza, and 
they are always occupied, day and night. When the sun has set 
the promenade commences. The major part of the promenaders 
are young ladies, sometimes attended by an elderly female; 
oftener alone; very seldom in the company of gentlemen. In 
many a northern city they would be exposed to rudeness. Noth- 
ing of the kind occurs in Chihuahua. I have never seen so uni- 
versally decorous a people. To romp, to talk loud, even in 
innocent glee, is quite unknown ; all questions are exchanged in 

(95) 



96 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

a low voice. To be reposeful and quiet seems to be the Mexican 
idea of good breeding. 

On the plaza, facing the east, is the great church, La Parrochia. 
It has two towers one hundred and fifty feet high. The towers 
are built in four receding stories, of columns of a graceful de- 
sign. The facade between the towers is a mass of carving of in- 
tricate pattern, and in niches are thirteen life-size figures of saints, 
while on the crest stands the winged Santiago, patron of Spain. 
There are entrances on the north and south, each set in a mass of 
carved work. Over the altar is a massive dome, which supplies 
light to the church. In the towers are chimes of bells, and bells 
are hung at every coigne of vantage, and these bells are eternally 
in motion. When the clock strikes the hour, two bells supple- 
ment its information, and about once in "fifteen minutes all the 
bells are set going with a deafening clangor. This being the 
month of May, sacred to the Virgin, services are held with un- 
usual frequency. The interior of the church is striking from its 
height and vastness, but for no other reason. The pictures are 
revolting. In no country have I seen the sufferings of Christ de- 
picted with such brutal fidelity. There are crucifixes in these 
old Mexican churches, where the wounds, the bruises, the rigidity 
of death, the clotted blood, affected me as if I had suddenly dis- 
covered a murdered corse in the woods. The high altar is of 
immense proportions, so that it is ascended by stairs, but it is a 
inass of gilt paper, artificial flowers, and mirrors, of which these 
people of the South appear to be so exceedingly fond. 

Such is the great church of Chihuahua. I have many times 
stepped in while service was in progress, and have noted what 
may be seen in every Spanish- American country — the vast ma- 
jority of women among the worshippers. They knelt or sat upon 
the floor by hundreds, while the men could be counted by scores; 
and many of them left before the service was over. The priest 
of La Parrochia is a marked figure as he goes about the streets 
with a robe of black, with a cape like that of an army over- 
coat. He is a man of wealth and imperious bearing, and in his 
look reminds me somewhat of the first Napoleon. The same 



RECOLLECTIONS OF CHIHUAHUA. 97 

Napoleonic head is seen in the pictures of Morelos, the priest 
who led the Mexican struggle for independence after the death 
of Hidalgo. Down a long, narrow street that leads out of the 
plaza is the Casa de Moneda, or mint, with its tower in which 
Hidalgo was imprisoned. Soldiers are always on guard here, 
and further down are the barracks. There are about one thou- 
sand men in garrison in Chihuahua. These troops are from the 
Gulf coast. The men are much darker than the inhabitants of 
Chihuahua, and in fact many of them are pure Indians. The 
infantry wear a linen jacket and pautaloons, and a round leather 
hat with a red pompon. They are armed with breech-loaders. 
They are drilled entirely with the bugle, and move with reason- 
able steadiness. They are not as robust physically as the Amer- 
icans, English, or Germans, but they are larger than the average 
French infantryman. They live on little, and are said to be 
rapid and far marchers. Well led, they ought to be fair soldiers. 
The cavalry are better clad, wearing a dark-blue uniform, a copy 
of the French, and wide white shoulder belts. Those I have seen 
rode indifferently, perhaps because they were incumbered with 
the iron war club technically called a cavalry saber. The offi- 
cers of both are handsomely uniformed in dark blue, with trim- 
mings of scarlet, and silver. Some of these troops have been 
stationed on the frontier, and have acquired so much of the 
English language as is necessary in the transaction of their "reg- 
ular business;" at least one of them has asked me in an intelli- 
gible manner for a dime to buy a drink of whisky. 

In Chihuahua soldiers do not have a monopoly of conspicuous 
clothes. Variety in unity is the Mexican motto. Occasionally 
a gentleman from the country is met whose costume apparently 
consists of a shirt and a pair of drawers; but the general "rig" 
of the lower order of the male persuasion is a pair of pantaloons 
cut off about six inches above the feet, with a white cotton exten- 
sion from there down, a jacket, a sombrero of straw, and around 
the shoulders the serape. This much-talked-of garment is largely 
mauufactured in Chihuahua. It is simply a coarse blanket, and 
looks like a gay-colored piece of rag carpet. The articles known 
in the rural districts of the United States as "galluses" are not 



98 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

in vogue in Mexico, consequently many of the men gird them- 
selves with a white handkerchief, which hangs down in triangular 
shape behind, producing a not very imposing effect. Among the 
poorest people shoes are not worn, but instead sandals of rawhide. 
Mexico is a country of grades, and from these Mexicans in serapes 
and sandals to the rich rulers of society it is a long way. These 
last, in many instances, are ultra-fashionables in the matter of 
clothes, and the old Mexican dress is seldom worn. Young men 
sometimes wear it when riding on the Alameda. It seems to me 
handsome and graceful. The silver-banded sombrero, the short 
jacket, and the pantaloons trimmed down the seams with gold or 
silver buttons and braid, does not seem theatrical when you see 
it commonly worn. The same may be said of the red or purple 
sash or waist-belt. That bit of color seems the mark of the com- 
mon Latin man the world over. It is worn by French-Canadian 
lumbermen, by Italian and Portugese sailors, and by Mexican 
laborers and herdsmen. 

The grand gathering-place of all the Chihuahua people, old 
and young, is the Alameda, so called, I suppose, from the alamo, 
or Cottonwood. It must originally have extended half around 
the town, from the river to the river again ; and Pike speaks of 
the promenade as existing in 1806. Four rows of cottonwoods 
make the Alameda, and many of the trees now standing are over 
one hundred years old. Their gnarled roots run along on top 
of the ground, twining with each other in many a fantastic fold. 
The place of many primeval cottonwoods has been supplied with 
others, and may the shadow of the Alameda never grow less. All 
along either side are stone benches of unknown age, on which 
successive generations of Chihuahuans have rested. Men born 
in a cold climate are prone to dash about in the sun, and risk sun- 
stroke; natives of a hot country never do. Consequently, if you 
would see the Alameda in its glory, you must see it in the early 
morning or later eve. It is a pretty sight in the fresh, cool morn- 
ing to see the crowded Alameda, the ladies seated on the stone 
sofas, watching the carriages as they drive slowly along, or the 
groups of the young bloods of Chihuahua, mounted on fine horses, 
with saddles of the most elaborate pattern. A pendent housing 



RECOLLECTIONS OF CHIHUAHUA. 99 

of goat-skin is very fashionable, and is quite showy. All is quiet ! 
The carriages move slowly ; the horsemen ride in a measured pace; 
nobody gallops, nobody whoops; the band plays gentle, plaintive 
airs; and the spectators — they just sit still and look idly happy. 

On the Alameda may be seen the beauty of Chihuahua; and 
here is a good place to speak of the question of the existence of 
"the beautiful Seiiorita." Many Americans traveling in New 
Mexico come back swearing that the "beautiful Seiiorita" is a 
myth. But such would change their minds in Chihuahua. There 
the beautiful Spanish eye and the mass of glossy hair of mid- 
night blackness is the almost universal heritage of the women. 
You may walk the Alameda for a mile and never see a tress of 
brown or gold, or any hue save the blackest of all blacks. There 
is every variety of complexion, though there seems to be a gen- 
eral sameness of feature. There are girls as brown as Arabs, and 
girls whose faces seem like faintly-clouded ivory, and these last 
are blessed with features such as one sees on cameos. The fault — 
and it is a general one — is a lack of expression. The face, at 
church, on the plaza, on the Alameda, everywhere, is the same. 
The large, dark eyes seem watching the world go by, too indiffer- 
ent to kindle with a smile or sparkle with a tear. 

The children under four years old are almost universally 
plump and pretty. I have seen in front of the poorest adobe 
huts in Chihuahua, little half-clad girls playing, whose beauty 
would make them the pride of any Northern household; but 
meagerness and age come early, and with age, among the poorer 
classes, comes hideousness. 

With this last word comes the recollection of the beggars of 
Chihuahua, and yet there is nothing very hideous about them. 
When it is one's business to be miserable it is in order to look as 
miserable as possible, and this the Mexican beggar does. He is 
wrapped up in an absolute overcoat of woe. I liked him much 
better than the truculent, bullying, stand-and-deliver beggar of 
our country. There is a melancholy music in his voice, and he 
is such a Christian, withal. He asks assistance in the name of 
our blessed Lady of Guadaloupe, with the remark that were that 
blessed personage on earth, she herself would help him, but as 

LofC. 



100 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

she is gone he is obliged to ask help of the passing gentleman, 
whose life may God spare to illimitable years. I saw a miser- 
able-looking old man take the proffered handful of copper, raise 
the money to his lips and kiss it; then lift his eyes heavenward 
and murmur a benediction on the giver. It was all acting, 
probably, but it was beautifully done. The well-to-do people are 
kind to the beggars. Saturday is the regular beggars' day, and 
many of the business houses make regular provision, not of 
money, but of food for them. I presume it is from religious sen- 
timent, or that sentiment hardened into custom. 

Gentlemen, ladies, soldiers, countrymen, beggars, and divers 
other persons have been noticed, and we will speak of the streets 
— the scenery, so to speak. 

There is a noticeable absence of life and stir, but this is more 
in appearance than reality. It takes a stranger some time to 
learn that the houses face in, and not out. The court, or placita, 
is the center of household life, and of that you can catch only a 
glimpse from the walk. In Chihuahua the placitas are full of 
flowering plants, in the universal earthen jars, and moreover are 
the homes of countless mocking-birds in gayly-painted wicker 
cages. Going along in the afternoon on the shady side of the 
street, one hears flowing out of the street door, half ajar, a rip- 
pling flood of melody from the cages among the figs and olean- 
ders. It makes you think of Keats's nightingale, "singing of 
summer in full-throated ease." 

When you go to the post office in Chihuahua, you go into a 
placita full of birds and flowers, and come around into a small 
room where there are two or three clerks. It seems like a pri- 
vate office. The clerk looks over a pile of undelivered letters, 
and gives you your own. It is very home-like, but unbusiness-like, 
and will all be changed soon. 

There is little rumbling of wheels in the paved streets. There 
are stages, omnibuses and pleasure carriages, but not the crowd 
of farm wagons one sees in Kansas. Instead, there are certain 
streets devoted to the awfullest-looking carts, with wheels of solid 
wood, drawn by droves of oxen or herds of mules. They hitch 
the beasts on four abreast until the load starts. Everything on 



RECOLLECTIONS OF CHIHUAHUA. 101 

these carts, whatever the load may be, is done up in a yucca mat- 
ting, or in rawhide. Otherwise the rough roads would jolt it to de- 
struction. There are droves of burros loaded with wood, adobes 
and stones for the public building. The milkman goes his rounds 
on a burro. The cans are suspended in a wicker basket on either 
side, and the milkman sits away aft on the animal's back piazza. 
The burro is the great factor in business life in Mexico. If he 
should use his ears for wings and fly away, the country would be 
paralyzed. He is miserably clubbed, and his feed is an illusion, 
but I am inclined to think he likes it. A burro transplanted to 
Kansas to live on full rations, and with nothing to do but carry 
round-legged children about, ought to feel himself in heaven, but 
if you look at him you will see homesickness in his countenance. 
He is longing for somebody to hit him with a rock and swear at 
him in Spanish. 

Signs are not as numerous as with us, but as we have the " Dew 
Drop In" saloon, and the English have the ''Bull and Mouth" 
tavern, so the Mexican indulges in the barber shop of " Progress " 
and the grocery store of " The Sun of May." Most charming was 
the candor of a juice vender near the plaza, whose sign announced 
the " Little Hell " saloon. Governor St. John would have thought 
this everlastingly appropriate. 

Such are a few of the sights of Chihuahua; little things, it is 
true, but things that attract the attention of a stranger and linger 
in his memory. Much more might be said in the same vein, par- 
ticularly in regard to the big two-days fiesta and its sights and 
sounds. 

Saying nothing of its commercial importance, in the days when 
the great tide of travel sets into Mexico, Chihuahua will be an 
interesting town to visitors from the North, in the same way that 
Chester is to Americans in England, because it is the first old 
foreign city reached. For that reason I half hope the old place 
will not be utterly " done over " by the " march of improvement." 
I am sure I shall not forget a word of it. The great church with 
its noisy bells, the plaza, the Alameda, the stores where all the 
goods seemed red or yellow, the liquor shops with splendid shelves 
filled with bottles of colored water, the soldiers, the porters with 
7 



102 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

their big loads, the women with their water jars, the children with 
their bare brown shoulders and their Spanish prattle — all these 
I shall remember probably when I have forgotten many more use- 
ful and worthy things; andj3o£for the present, a truce to further 
recollections. 






SOME FURTHER JOURNEYINGS. 



They said we must eat dinner at twelve sharp, and be at 
the stage office at one o'clock, if we would leave Chihuahua that 
Wednesday afternoon, but I had from two o'clock till three to 
lounge in the stage office, a large and lofty apartment looking 
out on the white glaring street on one side, and into the flower- 
full and shady placita on the other. All the Mexicans of Chi- 
huahua were enjoying their siesta at that hour, but it is not God's 
will that an American shall sleep in the daytime. So I looked 
at the pictures of Lincoln and Washington and Juarez, on the 
wall, and at a little card which announced to the friends of the 
family that the "legitimate child" of So-and-so had been born 
and baptized on the dates given. There were some Spanish 
books on a shelf, school books and others, but they were nearly 
all translations from the French. From France to Spain and 
Spain to Mexico is a long ways round. 

At last the six mules were brought around and hitched to the 
old Concord stage, (I expect there is a line of these old Concord 
coaches running over the Mountains of the Moon,) and by de- 
grees we got started. When we got all our passengers there 
were seven inside — a gentleman, two ladies and a little boy, going 
back to Massachusetts; my friend Matfield (whom may Heaven 
preserve), the writer, and a young man from Durango, a well- 
dressed, pleasant fellow of twenty-five or thereabouts. He was 
quite fair; and Matfield said he belonged to a family of Spanish 
or Mexican Israelites. He was dressed after the American fash- 
ion, and at home I should have taken him for a commercial 
traveler; but he was on his way to see his first locomotive and 
take his first ride on a railroad train. He was the most mercu- 
rial and excitable Mexican I had seen, and his cries and exclama- 

(103) 



104 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

tions when the stage went over a bad place excited great 
amusement among his fellow-passengers, who, being Americans, 
did not care whether they got their necks broken or not, so that 
the stage got through on time. 

At Sacramento we changed mules, and a little Mexican girl 
brought us water to drink. At the ranche of Sauz we stopped, 
after the moon had risen, for supper. I have spoken of the fort- 
like appearance of these ranches in a previous letter. The in- 
terior we found less gloomy than we expected. The large room 
where we took supper was brilliantly lighted with candles, 
(kerosene has not yet begun its work of destruction here,) and 
the table was set by the lady of Sauz herself. She was a widowed 
sister of Gov. Terassas, and as she bustled about the table, she 
reminded me in look and manner of hundreds of elderly house- 
wives I have seen in Vermont. Woodman said she looked like 
his grandmother in Massachusetts. The supper was an excellent 
one, the table being set on the American plan, as the old lady 
understood it, but we had the native Mexican coffee, black and 
strong. 

While the time passed I went into the kitchen and watched a 
woman make tortillas, a thin corn cake flattened out with the 
hands and dried through on a griddle. It was dry and tasteless ; 
it was like chewing a piece of the St. Louis Republican. 

In the dim moonlight we jogged along from the ranche of 
Sauz to that of Encinillas. In these lone night-wrapped Mexi- 
can plains, we talked about the drama and music, and the young 
Bostonian sang in a very pleasant voice, "There was a warrior 
bold," whereat our friend from Durango summoned with one 
tremendous effort his stock of English, clapped his hands and 
bravely cried: "Ver-r-r-ah good." Then there was drowsy 
silence until we reached Encinillas, which is a little town com- 
posed of the people who take care of the thousands of cattle on 
the plains about. There was a long delay, but that was ex- 
pected, and when the appointed hour came we resumed our journey. 
In the United States we should have gone directly to the end 
of the track, but as it was, we passed it and went along the lake 
to a squalid little hamlet called Ojo-Laguna. Here we remained 



SOME FURTHER JOURNEYINGS. 105 

until dawn whitened the east, and then Ojo-Laguna, or the quad- 
rupedal portion of it, woke up. The sweet burro who sings 
tenor woke from his slumber in the corral the veteran who sings 
basso profundo, and various sopranos and contraltos joined in the 
strain, which floated across the waters of the lake and echoed in 
the distant mountains; Mexican curs, fierce and savage, yelped 
as if their hearts would break; dismal "early village cocks" 
tuned their asthmatic pipes; and pigs, reddest and thinnest of 
the porcine tribe, contributed their dulcet squeals. "Matins" 
at Ojo-Laguna will long be remembered. 

Fortunately we moved off before sunrise, and so in stillness 
saw it come. We were in a valley, or what seemed to have been 
the bed of an ancient lake. The mountains seemed to shut it 
in. The mountain-chain on the east cast its shadow on the 
plain as clearly as the disk on the moon when it is in eclipse; 
beyond, the mountains to the west were being lit up, one by one, 
by the caudles of the morning. Peak, and pinnacle, and rocky 
wall and deep gorge and shadowy canon, received each in its 
turn its light, now purple, now rosy red, now golden, till the 
work was done; the daily miracle was finished, and it was broad 
and open day. 

By nine o'clock we were flying, at first-class passenger train 
time, for El Paso. The conductor was Al. Duagan, of Atchison, 
the first passenger conductor on the Mexican Central. Mr. D. in- 
quired after the Atchison people, and remarked incidentally that 
he was personally cognizant of the circumstances attending the 
decease of our late lamented townsman, Mr. "Dutch Bill." If 
I correctly remember, this was Mr. Duagan's account of the 
disastrous affair: 

"You see Bill, he turned up in Gunnison, as a 'sure thing' 
man. Well, the marshal and the police they was tryin' to hold 
the town down, and after awhile they ruther got the edge on the 
rustlers, and Bill and his pard flew. After that, about four 
miles from town, I see Bill one day in a corral, and pretty soon 
a man come along on horseback, and asked where he was, and 
in a few minutes I heard a shootin', and when I got there they'd 
got him. They'd bored a hole through his kidneys." 



106 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

El Paso, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, were reached early in 
the afternoon, and the next evening travel was resumed north- 
ward on the good old A. T. & S. F. The evening ride up the 
road was pleasanter than the morning ride down had been, and 
I would beseech my countrymen and countrywomen, journeying 
at evening along the road, to take a look at Las Cruces. Back 
of the town rises, like the curtain of a theater, those cliffs whose 
fluted columned sides and pointed pinnacles of varying heights, 
have given to the range the name of the Organ mountains; at 
their foot jut, like the edge of the stage, the mesa; and then in 
the near foreground is the little town by the river's brim, Las 
Cruces. There are vineyards, acres on acres; there seemed to 
be great spreading apple trees, such as my grandfather planted 
in Vermont; there were great tufted cottonwoods, almost hiding 
the roofs of the town. Across the railroad ran the cause of all 
this — the high-banked acequia, fringed with rushes. 

Certainly no man of sense or observation can travel in these 
countries without acknowledging the value of irrigation. New 
Mexico and much of Old Mexico would be uninhabitable without 
it. I have seen wonderful growth here on red and stony ground 
that a Kansas farmer would pronounce worthless. It is impossi- 
ble to doubt now the basis of reason underlying the Garden City 
experiment in Kansas, undertaken under far more favorable cir- 
cumstances than can exist in New Mexico or Colorado, as far as 
the water supply and the quality of the soil are concerned. But 
while I throw up the sponge on the general issue, I still have my 
doubts as to the results, and for this reason : Irrigation, at best, 
is undertaken in connection with small farming and gardening, 
both of which are an abomination in the eyes of the average 
Western farmer. He is a man of vast ideas, who cannot be 
induced to contemplate small matters. He wants a section or 
nothing. At Garden City I was shown a piece of ground half 
the size of an Atchison town lot, on which $300 worth of onions 
had been raised. But your average farmer I am speaking of — 
from Illinois, Iowa and the big corn States — had sooner lose money 
on 640 acres of wheat than to make money on an acre of onions. 
Gardening of any sort, no matter how profitable, is " running a 



SOME FURTHER JOURNEYINGS. 107 

truck patch" with him, and he will have none of it. Irrigation, 
too, is a work that is done with one's hands and feet. The water 
must be let into the little beds at a proper time with a hoe. There 
is no machine, nor can there be, to do that sort of work, and the 
wide-out, boundless and preeminently extensive Western farmer 
will not get down to that variety of manual labor. If it were 
possible to invent a four-horse, endless apron, side-draft irrigator, 
adorned with red paint and a chattel mortgage, which would irri- 
gate forty acres a day, then I might have hope that the idea of 
irrigation would be seized upon by our agricultural fellow-citizens 
of Kansas. At present I have no such confidence. The patient 
and industrious Germans, who form a large majority of the market 
gardeners around every American city, may take hold of irrigation 
and make a success of it. I would advise even them to employ 
Mexicans, who can be secured in Colorado. There is no use in try- 
ing to tell what might be made of the banks of the Arkansas were 
they cultivated as are the banks of the Rio Grande. A Las 
Cruces every few miles, where there are now bare, sunburnt ham- 
lets that stick up like a sore thumb, would be a refreshing sight 
indeed. The upper Arkansas Valley might be the garden, the 
orchard, of Colorado, and even Old Mexico, now about to pour 
out such riches as Cortez never dreamed of. 

But we have stopped a loug time at Las Cruces, and must 
get on. 

As stated in a former letter, I have had a desire to see before 
leaving this country a sure-enough mine. "Blossom Rock," and 
"indications," and "prospect holes," did not satisfy me. What 
was wanted was a sight of silver ore, of silver itself coming out 
of the ground in quantities at the present time. 

After considerable inquiry I came to the conclusion that the 
best place to visit was the Lake Valley mines, located at the 
little town of Daly, Dona Ana county, New Mexico. I had 
also a melancholy interest in the locality from the fact that my 
poor friend, Lieutenant George Smith, of the Ninth Cavalry, 
was killed by the Indians not far from the place. 

I left the north-bound train at Rincon, stayed there till morn- 
ing, and then took the down-train for Nutt station, twenty-one 



108 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

miles from Rincon, and twelve from the mines. A stage 
took me over the open prairie rising to the foot-hills of the Black 
Range, in the very edge of which the mines are located. We 
climbed no rocks, passed through no canons. It was easier than 
driving from Atchison to Nortonville. There is a little triangu- 
lar opening in the smooth hills, which are dotted with soap- 
weed, and here is the new stamp mill and the office of the super- 
intendent, and the hotel and the several shops and stores that 
make up the little town of Daly; and on the lower edge of one 
of the hills, three hundred yards from the stamp mill, were the 
mines. Had I not known to the contrary, I should have sup- 
posed that they were getting out the dark sandstone, such as you 
find along the Solomon valley at Minneapolis; or perhaps I 
might have taken it for iron ore. It was in reality silver ore. 
They were digging and blasting it out, just as they do the Sixth- 
street bluff at Atchison, with the difference that when a blast 
went off it lifted from $3,000 to $6,000 into the air. I had no 
letters of introduction, and the bare statement of my occupation 
in life relieved any suspicion that I wished to purchase a mine 
or mines. In the absence of Mr. D. H. Jackson, the superin- 
tendent, Mr. Gibson, the book-keeper, went about with me. The 
lower edge of the hillside was cut up with trenches and holes. 
Along the trenches was piled up the ore. The ore could not 
have been put back into the trenches again. Limestone bulk- 
heads had been built up, and on these was ore regularly corded up 
as if for measurement. The finest ore had been sorted over and 
put in sacks. I was told that a chunk of this XXX, which I 
would carelessly have thrown at a dog, was worth from $3 to $5. 
There it was, dug from the surface to a depth of six or eight 
feet, cords on cords of it, running from hundreds to thousands of 
dollars to the ton. It was dug as easily and cheaply as so much 
limestone, cheaper than coal, and yet it was silver. 

Mr. Gibson went back to his books, and I went down to the 
stamp mill and talked to Mr. Town, the builder. He looked 
like Colonel Towne, of the Fort Scott & Gulf, and may have 
been a relative of that wonderful mechanical family. The mill, 
to be in operation about June 15, cost $100,000. Every stick in 



SOME FURTHER JOURNEYINGS. 10& 

it came from Puget's Sound, 1,600 miles by water and 1,300 miles 
by rail. One piece of timber contained 1,100 feet of lumber. 
The mill was a twenty- stamp, running two sets of stamps, etc.,. 
so as to work two different lots of ore at the same time. Mr. 
Town explained the amalgamation process as I had heard it at 
Socorro, but giving many details, however, which would not in- 
terest the reader. I was, however, more interested in Mr. Town 
than anything else. He had been working about mines for thirty 
years, and his hands were bitten to pieces by quicksilver. I never 
realized before what a colossal business this gold and silver min- 
ing is. He chalked out on the floor the great porphyry ledge on 
which the Comstock is located. He told me how many millions 
had been taken out of this mine, and here, right alongside, mil- 
lions of dollars had been sunk in the rock, and not an ounce of 
ore had been found. He told me of the enormous cost of it. At 
one mine a cylinder weighing twenty-six tons had been dragged up 
over a railroad constructed for the purpose. Building the pyra- 
mids was a child's play compared with it. He told me that this 
twenty-stamp mill at Daly, though so large, was but an aver- 
age; that there was a mill in the Black Hills that ran one hun- 
dred stamps. Then he told me of men working 3,600 feet 
under ground ; of places so hot that a man ran through them as 
through a prairie fire; where a drop of water falling on the skin 
blistered it. Ah, this silver quarter that we toss to the butcher 
or to the baker: how much thought and energy and skill and 
labor and suffering it takes to wring it from the earth ! 

After dinner, Mr. Jackson having returned, we visited the un- 
derground works. By this time quite a party had collected. In 
one new-comer I recognized a trausient Topeka acquaintance of 
years ago. He had been living for years in Georgetown, and 
knew all about mines. We went down into the "Bridal Cham- 
ber." It is perhaps fifty feet from the surface, and shut off from 
the shaft by a door. Eight or ten men can stand in the excava- 
tion. A candle held to the walls reveals millions of shining par- 
ticles. It looks like a mass of earth, half-decayed sandstone, and 
here and there masses of ore that can be cut with a knife. This 
last is horn silver. From this place specimens have been assayed 



110 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

running $29,000 to the ton. All around is ore that will run 
$10,000 to the ton. A ton can be broken down with four or five 
blows with a pick. A man could scrape up a fortune with his 
bare hands. 

We went through galleries, and looked at piles of ore until we 
were tired. Then we went to the office and looked at a little brick 
weighing eight and a half ounces, taken from two pounds of ore. 

This is all. I am no mining expert, and have no interest in 
the ups and downs of mines, but I will venture the statement 
that last Saturday I saw the richest silver mine in the United 
States. There are four mining companies with claims at Daly — 
the Sierra Grande, the Sierra Bella, the Sierra Rica, and the Sierra 
Apache. 



MEXICO AND RAILROADS. 



As a man may live in ignorance of the real nature and charac- 
ter of his own wife and children, so we of the United States have 
long been in darkness concerning everything pertaining to Mex- 
ico and the Mexicans. It is quite certain that more books about 
Mexico have been published in France than in the United States, 
and in a commercial point of view the influence of France and 
England has been vastly greater than that of our country. In 
the markets of Chihuahua to-day French and English goods are 
sold under our very noses — goods which we claim to manufac- 
ture cheaper and better than anybody else. I saw at El Paso del 
Norte, not only foreign rails being laid down, but cross-pieces and 
insulators for telegraph poles imported from England. 

To the average ill-informed American, a Mexican is a "Greaser," 
a low-bred, infamous creature, without manners or morals; lazy, 
cowardly, treacherous and ignorant. The men have been uni- 
formly represented as without honor, and the women without 
virtue. Mexico has been represented as an utterly priest-ridden 
country, and not in any sense a Christian country. Bishop Haven 
was fond of saying that the human sacrifices of the Aztecs gave 
way to the " religion of Cortez," and that the Christian religion 
was unknown in Mexico until it was introduced by some sojdiers 
of the American army under Gen. Scott. 

I suppose it is possible for an American to live twenty-five 
years in Mexico and retain all these prejudices. Judge King- 
man, in his lecture "Across the Continent on a Buckboard," 
spoke of the style of American who lives in New Mexico for 
twenty-five or thirty years, absorbs all the native vices in addi- 
tion to those he imported with him, but to the last declares that 

(111) 



112 SOUTHWESTEEN LETTEES. 

he is an American, and trusts that God may burn him in perdi- 
tion if he is not also a Protestant. 

For myself, I am not conscious of entertaining many prejudices 
at the most, and of those, few which will not yield to reason and 
evidence; and, beside, to me the most offensive feature of our 
national character — and we get it from the English — is the 
habit of considering every people who do not conform to our 
standard in dress, manners, government and religion as heathen 
and the scum of the earth. 

Divesting himself of such feelings, if he entertain them, and 
the American finds that Mexico is a great country, with numer- 
ous natural resources, inhabited by a people very different, it is 
true, from the people of the United States, yet a people proud of 
and attached to their country; proud of its independence, and 
teaching their children the history of the struggle by which that 
independence was achieved. He will find a people governed by 
a certain social code, and extremely tenacious in regard to its 
observance; as much so as the French or any European people. 
He will find a people who, while adhering to their ancient relig- 
ion, have yet deprived the church of its power as a political 
organization ; who have remanded the priest to the altar, where 
he belongs, and, more than any other Spanish-American country, 
have effected the secularization of education. This last step, 
the absolute elimination of the church as a political factor, has 
brought about what Mexico has long needed — the destruction 
of the idea of imperialism, revived once and again by Iturbide 
and by Maximilian. I do not say that any form of religion is 
incompatible with republicanism, but I do say that universal 
secular education is necessary to its existence. This point Mex- 
ico is -steadily approaching. There are ten public schools in 
Chihuahua, and in the city council room of Chihuahua may be 
seen a piece of embroidery, a testimonial from the children of 
the city schools to the city government. The Governor of the 
State of Guanajuato has recently submitted a bill to the Legis- 
lature providing for compulsory education. A knowledge of 
reading and writing is much more commonly diffused among the 
common people of Mexico than is generally supposed by foreign- 



MEXICO AND EAILEOADS. 113 

ers, and I have ooticed that Mexicans usually write a hand 
remarkable for beauty and legibility. 

With the settlement of the imperial and clerical questions has 
come a settled government and the reign of law under the rule 
of General Porfirio Diaz and his successor, General Gonzalez. 
Courts exist everywhere in Mexico, the system being somewhat 
like our own, save that in the courts above that of the justice of 
the peace the proceedings are all in writing. I have seen the 
reports of the Supreme Court of the Republic advertised for 
sale, as the reports of the State Supreme Courts are sold in the 
United States. 

It will thus be seen that the idea that Mexico is a country 
without laws, without order, and with an utterly barbarous, ig- 
norant and vicious population, is erroneous. 

The progress of the country has been made clearer to my mind 
by looking over the volumes containing the text of the conces- 
sions under which the construction of the Mexican Central Rail- 
road has been undertaken. The volume makes, in Spanish and 
English, two hundred pages. An intelligent American gentle- 
man of Chihuahua said to me that the Congress of the United 
States could learn a great deal from the careful course pursued 
by the Mexican government in its dealings with corporations. 
In the pages before me, the government pledges itself to aid the 
construction of a great railway system, extending the length and 
breadth of the Republic ; more strictly speaking, from the city of 
Mexico to El Paso del Norte, a distance of 1,300 miles, with 
transverse lines running from Tampico to San Bias, and connect- 
ing the Gulf and the Pacific. It pledges to this great enterprise 
a subsidy of $14,500 a mile, exempts the road from taxation 
for fifteen years, admits all material for its construction free of 
duty, and provides that six per cent, of the customs revenue 
of the country shall be devoted to the payment of the subsidy. 
On the other hand, the interest of the people is carefully looked 
after; the passenger and freight tariff is fixed; the former in no 
case to exceed five cents a mile for first-class passage, with second 
and third-rate fares to correspond. Every detail in regard to 
damages to private and public property is looked after. The 



114 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

method of construction must be such as the government approves • 
and in the evenfrthat the railroad company does not comply in 
every respect with the letter and spirit of the contract, then the 
road is declared forfeited, and the road may be taken by the 
government and the contract re-let to the same or other parties, 
since the Mexican government does not propose to become in any 
event a builder of railroads. It seems to me that in these con- 
cessions there is displayed genuine and far-seeing statesmanship ; 
and yet the statesmen who drew up the conditions were Mexicans 
born and bred. 

It seems a little singular that after capitalists and adventurers 
of every nation, French, Spanish and English, have had the first 
chance in Mexico for years, that this concession should at last be 
obtained by a company of New-Englanders, headed officially by 
an ex-Cape Cod sea captain. Such is the case, however. The 
men into whose hands the railroad system of Mexico has been 
committed are those whose names are familiar in Kansas, from 
the fact that they are painted on the locomotives of the Atchison, 
Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. 

The value of the concession (which includes several former 
minor grants) is incalculable. There can never be another great 
railroad in Mexico. By the terms of the concession no compet- 
ing line can be built within twenty leagues. The line runs along 
the high table-land, the backbone, as it were, of Mexico, and 
there is no room for any other. By the terms of the concession 
the road must reach, directly or by branch, the capital of every 
State between El Paso and the city of Mexico. It thus reaches 
every important point. Chihuahua is one of the smallest in 
point of population of the Mexican State capitals. Zacatecas 
was described to me as " eight times as large as Chihuahua and 
a hundred times as rich," and there are larger and richer cities 
than Zacatecas. 

The road runs through two zones, or from the temperate to 
the confines of the torrid zone. It runs through cotton, cocoa, 
coffee and sugar fields, and through a country full of mines which 
have yielded their unexhausted treasures for three centuries. It 
is the most romantic enterprise that a lot of practical Yankees 



MEXICO AND RAILROADS. 115 

ever took hold of. I believe it is the great railroad boom of the 
immediate future, and I expect a Kansas exodus will follow its 
construction. I expect that within two years the mails will be 
burdened with letters addressed to "formerly of Kansas" men, 
residing in Chihuahua, Durango, Zacatecas, Aguas Caliente, 
Guadalajara, and other Mexican cities. 

Some very well posted people have asserted that the road will 
never do a passenger business. Such persons do not understand the 
Mexican temperament. The Mexican is a social being ; he likes 
to go about and visit his friends. He is fond of traveling. In 
the New-Mexican towns where street railways have been built, 
he is their constant patron. When the new world of the North 
is open to him, he will not fail to go and see it. The wealthy 
Mexican travels as a luxury. Many of the higher classes of 
Mexicans visit Europe, and many Mexican gentlemen have been 
educated abroad. This class of travelers will constantly enlarge. 

The influence of the railroad is seen the moment one crosses 
the line and enters El Paso del Norte. Here a Kansas man, 
ex-Governor Anthony, with several Kansas associates, has been 
at work, and has built the first railroad town in Mexico. 
There is a yard of fifty-seven acres, numerous tracks and turn- 
tables, shops, store-houses, freight-houses, and now a new depot. 
The American has sensibly adopted in this building the Mexi- 
can adobe, but he makes the adobes with machinery of his own, 
turning them out ten times as fast as under the Mexican plan. El 
Paso is now to the Mexican Central what Topeka is to the A. T. 
& S. F. Hundreds of Mexican laborers are employed. They 
get wages such as they never dreamed of before, fill up with 
American "grub" at the railroad boarding-house, and are trans- 
formed internally and externally. These men will never again 
follow the banner of any revolutionary chief. They will take 
no heed of pronunciamento.s if they are issued. They will at- 
tend to their regular business. It is a pleasure to know that in 
this great enterprise a fellow-citizen of ours has borne a promi- 
nent part. Ex-Governor Anthony was early on the ground, has 
encountered and overcome a mountain of prejudice on the part 
of the local Mexican authorities; has worked day and night, 
attending to every detail, and will soon have the satisfaction of 



116 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

riding into Chihuahua over a first-class road, over which trains 
have been already run at the rate of forty miles an hour. 

I think one secret of Governor Anthony's success betrays itself 
in the kindly and interested tone in which he spoke of the Mexi- 
can people. He had much to say of their law-abiding and 
peaceful character. In fact, he has a theory that the troubles of 
Mexico have resulted, not from a lawless disposition on the part 
of the common people, but from their devotion to those whom 
they have been accustomed to regard as their lawful and legiti- 
mate leaders. Naturally adverse to fighting, they will yet follow 
those to whom they have been accustomed to look for orders to 
the last gasp. With the spread of education this distinction of 
leaders and led will cease in Mexico, at least in its present form. 

By the terms of the law, the Mexican Central is a Mexican 
enterprise. All its officers and employes are, in law, Mexicans. 
They have no recourse to any foreign power or potentate. In 
accepting the subsidy and other aid they consent to conduct their 
enterprise under the laws of Mexico, and no other. This seems 
to me just, and it will be an interesting study to watch Mexico 
work out her own salvation through the railroad. 

As I have said, I look upon Mexico as the great opening field 
of enterprise, and I expect that many Kansans will try their 
fortunes therein. To such I would say, that they will do well to 
drop on the frontier the most of their preconceived notions about 
Mexico and the Mexicans; to be prepared to respect the preju- 
dices and feelings of the people ; and to avoid, not only rowdyism 
as a matter of course, but that lofty superciliousness and loud 
and intolerable bumptiousness which makes so many traveling 
Englishmen and Americans utterly detested in foreign parts. 
People who cannot like anybody but themselves, or any country 
except their own, had better stay at home. To an American of 
a kindly, tolerant and forbearing spirit, willing to put up with 
unavoidable inconveniences — in short, to an American gentle- 
man, Mexico will prove a most interesting country, and should 
certainly be visited, especially now that the country is soon to be 
opened up in its length and breadth by a great railroad, the re- 
sult of American enterprise, and, it is but just to add, of Mexi- 
can liberality and public spirit. 



OUT ON THE ATLANTIC & PACIFIC. 



At Albuquerque I struck a uevv railroad, the Atlantic & Pacific. 
There is more of it back east, but the connection is lost somewhere 
in the Indian Territory, and is taken up again at Albuquerque. 
It starts at that town and pushes out into the Western wilds — a 
veritable Christopher Columbus of a railroad. 

At Albuquerque the road has built fine shops and offices, and 
has about three hundred people employed. It has done much to 
operate the Albuquerque boom, which I regard as about the most 
genuine in New Mexico. 

Other railroads are built to reach certain way points, as well 
as to connect certain terminals; but the Atlantic & Pacific starts 
out to the mountains, canons, deserts, sage-brush, Indians and 
"rustlers" with an eye single to going to California. There was 
not a "laid-out" town on its route when it was projected, nor do 
I believe that there ever would have been a town had the road 
not been built. As it is, the road has started out carrying its 
own wood, water and provisions, and has reached the Canon 
Diablo, which means the Devil's Own Canon, a matter of three 
hundred miles from Albuquerque. 

The reason this otherwise unaccountable railroad has been built, 
is because its engineers have found a place where the Rocky Moun- 
tains have simply played out; there is a gap in the great mountain 
fence, and through this opening the road has been run. There 
is, properly speaking, no pass, no defile, no canon — only a place 
where there seems to be no mountain. The track, with at the most 
a grade of 58 feet to the mile, climbs the Continental Divide, and 
then goes down at the same rate, and the road to the Pacific is 
open. This is the reason the Atlantic & Pacific has been built. 

The discovery of this route is associated with the name of 
8 * (117) 



118 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

Wingate. There is an old abandoned Fort Wingate near the 
line, and also a new Fort Wingate; but who Wingate was, no. 
body along the road appeared to know. ^f~^ 

The west-bound passenger on the Atlantic & Pacific leaves 
Albuquerque at half-past nine o'clock at night, connecting with 
the Santa Fe train from the north. The night of my departure 
the cars were crowded, and every man had a roll of blankets 
and a gun. 

Morning, or rather, breakfast, found us at Coolidge, until 
lately known to all the country round as "Crane's ranche," (of 
which "more anon,") and then came Fort Wingate — the new 
one — the fort itself being situated at the foot of a line of pine- 
covered hills, in sight of, but some three miles from the track. 
Fort Wingate passed, the stations consisted of the station house 
and the name. 

By the dawn's early light you begin to notice Indians. The 
Atlantic & Pacific is the great and only Indian route. It is the 
only railroad by which you can reach Mr. Cushing'sJZunis, like- 
wise the Accomas, also the Navajos, also the Apaches. It 
makes a connection with the Moquis, and will soon give transit 
facilities to the clothesless Mojaves. If you want to see "In- 
juns," take the Atlantic & Pacific. The Zunis just now are at- 
tracting tourists and investigators on account of their advertising 
trip under the management of Mr. Cushing, who has found out 
more about them than they ever suspected themselves. Major 
Dane, who rejoined me at Albuquerque, paid them a visit. They 
seem to be much like other Pueblo Indians; they weave woolen 
goods like the Navajoes, raise peaches, grind corn with a couple 
of rocks, and eat mutton with the wool on. These seem to be 
the principal features of Zuni life. They are much attached to 
Mr. Cushing, whom they have elected register of deeds, county 
commissioner, or something of the kind. They were awaiting 
his return to assist in tying up bunches of feathers and getting 
ready for some grand and intensely-interesting ceremonies. The 
Accomas seem to have more practical sense than the Zunis. 
Major Dane and a traveling companion having incautiously used 
the word "Washington" in the Accoma country, werejpromptly 

/Woe/ . /£/*K V £T~^ *-// /&<£>*<, Ct^J^ $-MLv* 




OUT ON THE ATLANTIC & PACIFIC. 119 

put in arrest until the Indians could ascertain whether any new 
swindle was contemplated. The Major having convinced the 
Accomas that he did not live in Washington, and had no con- 
nection with the Interior Department, he was allowed to depart 
in safety. 

The Indians seen along the Alantic & Pacific are mostly Nav- 
ajos. They may be seen lounging around the stations, or work- 
ing along the railroad grade. Their droves of piebald horses 
and flocks of sheep and goats are seen at frequent intervals. The 
Indians herd their sheep and goats together, on account of the 
superior courage of the goats. When the sheep get frightened, 
and ready to run, and are in the state of mind peculiar to a 
Kansas legislator when he pipes out, " Mr. Speaker, I desire to 
change my vote," the goats stand still with their heads up and 
investigate the approaching object, and so encourage the sheep to 
follow their example. Thus is courage infectious even among 
brutes. 

The Navajos appear friendly to the railroad, and as yet have 
not organized an anti-monopoly party. In compliment to the 
tribe the railroad have named a station Manuelito, after the head 
chief of the Navajos. As the Navajos own a million sheep, their 
wool export is a matter of importance. 

The landscape from Coolidge to Defiance presents little change. 
On one side runs a line of forest-covered hills or mountains. On 
the other side stretches an almost unbroken perpendicular wall 
of red sandstone, crowned with trees; at Coolidge this wall is 
four or five miles from the track, at other points it is within a 
few rods. It is worn by the wind and the rain into fantastic 
shapes. At some points the wall is pierced by numerous holes 
as if worn by the action of gravel and water, like the "pot- 
holes" seen in the rocky beds of rivers. Between the sandstone 
bluffs and the wooded hills is a valley, or plateau, varying in 
width; and in many places white with a flower that lies on the 
surface like snow-flakes. It fades quickly, and is called the 
"phantom flower." The valley everywhere looks barren, bu- 
the flocks and herds seemed in good condition. There are nut 
merous springs in the foot-hills, and a particularly fine one at 
Fort Wingate. 



120 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

At the line of New Mexico and Arizona, which is marked by 
a post, the abomination of desolation commences. The red sand- 
stone changes to gray, and finally recedes on either hand into the 
blue distance, leaving a wide plain, broken here and there by 
piles of rock, which look like great masses of slag from a fur- 
nace. The surface, patched here and there with sage-brush, looks 
like an old dried buffalo hide. A dry river, the Rio Puerco, winds 
through the sandy solitude. In the rainy season this sandy, 
gravelly bed is suddenly filled with a rushing, roaring torrent, 
which tears everything to pieces. The railroad people were 
erecting barriers of plank and stone, and building levees and 
changing the bed of the stream, to avoid the possible and prob- 
able washouts. For miles not a tree was to be seen. It seemed 
like the bed of a dried sea, and here and there a long, low ledge 
of rocks looked like the hulk of some great ship, left stranded 
by the subsiding waters. The wind moaned and shrieked over 
the wilderness, catching up the sand in high, whirling columns, 
which sped across the line of vision, and then dissolved, sand to 
sand. Rocks, dead rivers, sand cyclones, and the fierce, unpity- 
ing sun — this was the scene. A running stream was reached at 
last, the Little Colorado. There, in an immensely wide, gravelly 
bed, runs a narrow flow of water. At Holbrook some cotton - 
woods were growing. At St. Joseph the Mormons have a set- 
tlement, and their little colonies are scattered along the Little 
'Colorado. A well-dressed and intelligent young man rode some 
distance on the train, whom I understood afterward was a Mor- 
mon storekeeper or commissary. Although the condition of the 
Mormons in Arizona had been discussed in his presence, he had 
not mentioned or suggested his connection with the multi-marry- 
ing people. I imagine polygamy does not flourish greatly among 
the sage brush of the Little Colorado and Rio Puerco country. 
A harem in Turkey may be a romantic idea ; but there is nothing 
particularly gorgeous in the Mormon reality — four or five hag- 
gard, angular, sun-bonneted, sandy-colored old girls, browsing 
around among the greasewood and cactus, and "dobes" and 
brush corrals of a desert. The spectacle of an old Mormon 
striking out on his burro through the sand by the wan moon- 



OUT ON THE ATLANTIC & PACIFIC. 121 

light to the music of the coyotes' midnight choir to woo and win 
his fifteenth bride, will never inspire another Moore to write an- 
other Lalla Rookh. 

Winslow, Arizona, was reached for supper, and a nicely-served 
meal it was. The town stands in a dead flat plain. In the dis- 
tance are scattered peaks, remains of some former mountain 
chain. Even the purple twilight did not redeem their weird bar- 
renness. They seemed to mark the confines of a lone land, tra- 
versed by no human foot, where only devils roam and satyrs cry. 
But turning from these scorched and splintered ruins of a lost 
world, there ran directly in front, outlined against the saffron 
sky, the most kindly, human, symmetrical mountain I have seen 
in all my wanderings in these southern regions. It is the Fran- 
cisco or San Francisco mountain, forty miles beyond the Canon 
Diablo, and directly in the path of the oncoming railroad. Its 
sides were dark with forest, its top was streaked with snow. It 
rose in gentle slopes to a long, wavy crest, and one could imagine 
the voice of waterfalls and the curling smoke from the homes of 
men about its feet. I saw it at sunset, by moonlight, and again 
at sunrise, and it was ever the same gentle and yet majestic pres- 
ence. From its summit, it is said, you can make out the windings 
of the Grand Canon of the Colorado. 

Canon Diablo, the present end of the Atlantic & Pacific track, 
was the last station reached. The canon is half a mile beyond 
the little town of tents, houses, shanties and box cars, and I saw 
it by moonlight. The word canon usually brings up the idea of 
a rift through a high mountain or a narrow passage between two 
mountains, but there is no mountain here — it is just a tremen- 
dous fissure in the level plain. You might ride your horse into 
it in the dark without the least warning of its existence. It may 
have been rent by an earthquake, perhaps worn by the action of 
water. I should incline to the former opinion. It has shelving 
sides composed of masses of rocks, is at the bridge two hundred 
and thirty feet deep, and is spanned by a bridge five hundred and 
forty feet long. At the bottom the canon seems the width of an 
ordinary wagon-road, and there can be discerned, like winding 
threads, the track laid down by the bridge-builders to aid in 



122 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

their work. The moon shone brightly, yet the view was broken 
by deep masses of shadow in the depths below. It was strange 
to look down from the bridge, which reached to the middle of 
the chasm, and realize that the great church of Chihuahua might 
stand down there, and yet you might look down one hundred feet 
on the glossy backs of the swallows that flit around its topmost 
spire. Canon Diablo, the Mexicans called it, a devilish obstruc- 
tion to their journeyings, causing them a detour of many miles, 
but it is no obstruction now. A few hours after I left, the heavy 
iron spans were swung as lightly to their places as a Mexican 
woman lifts the earthen jar of water to the shoulder at the 
fountain; and by the time these lines are read in Kansas the 
busy locomotive will be running on its errands to and fro. 

After a comfortable night at Canon Diablo station, the 
"chamber that opened to the sunrise" being a box car, a last 
look was taken at the great mountain which stands a sentinel at 
the gateway of the Pacific coast, and the backward journey was 
begun. It was a welcome moment when the train passed out of 
the plain and the road was winding about again in the sandstone 
defiles. It is only when one has traversed the desert, that he 
realizes the beauty and force of the old oriental simile, "the 
shadow of a great rock in a weary land." 

At Coolidge the hospitality of Mr. R. M. Bacheller, formerly 
of Emporia, the station agent, acting division superintendent and 
man-ofall-work of the Atlantic & Pacific, was enjoyed, and a 
night was passed in the late home of the "rustlers." Coolidge, 
the outgrowth of " Crane's ranche," has had a stirring history. 
The American frontier "wolf," beside whom a common Apache 
is a scholar, gentleman and Christian, for some time " held high 
wassail" as Major John N. Edwards would say, in that locality. 
"Hold-ups" were a daily and nightly occurrence. To simple 
robbery the more peaceable citizens submitted for awhile, but 
when to robbery, brutal violence was added, a general fight took 
place. At the conclusion of the exercises three of the outlaws 
and two of the citizens lay dead on the snow. There has been 
no general killing since, and Coolidge is at peace with "all the 
world and the rest of mankind." On the beautiful moonlight 



OUT ON THE ATLANTIC & PACIFIC. 123 

night of ray stay, the crowd that gathered in at "Hall's," (Hall 
being the alcalde and "Bascom" of the place,) though "bearded 
like the pard" and profusely ornamented with cartridge belts and 
"guns" of various calibers, were on peaceful thoughts intent. 
The talk was of home, of the long-gone hours we once enjoyed 
with the brethren in the grand lodge of the Sons of Malta, and 
other edifying subjects. The town presented a perfect picture of 
quiet and repose. The burghers lay on the counter and sat on the 
mackerel kits in Hall's store; the gamblers listlessly regarded 
very small piles of chips, and the female terror of the Far West, 
the "Apache Sal" or "Broncho Kate," of the place, sauntered 
about in slatternly ease with her cigar, but seemed thoughtful, 
pensive, almost sad, and failed to bestow on her gentleman ac- 
quaintances the usual quantity of deteriorated language. A few 
Indians, poor Navajoes whose untutored minds were intent on 
stealing something, flitted about in the moonlight wrapped in 
their blankets. A few revolver shots were heard occasionally, 
but they were fired at random and not on business. It was evi- 
dent that over Coolidge hung the shadow of impending reform. 
The Eastern novelist in search of material for a gory and ghastly 
tale of the bloody canon or the ghost-haunted gulch, will no longer 
find material at Coolidge or "Crane's ranche." So runs the 
world away. 

Through the kindness of Superintendent Angell, the rest of 
the return trip over the first division to Albuquerque was made 
by daylight, and the journey was made pleasant by the society 
of himself, Chief Engineer Kingman and Assistant Engineer 
Billings. The great attractions to a stranger and curiosity- 
seeker are the lava-beds, of which there are two. The volcano 
from which one of these rivers flowed is plainly visible near 
Blue Water station. The lava-bed itself has been partially cov- 
ered by sand and debris and vegetation, its course being traced 
by huge black and ragged masses here and there, but at Grant 
station the lava may be seen as perfect as on the slopes of Vesu- 
vius. It runs, or did run, a huge stream, twenty-five miles long, 
and from three to five miles wide. The railroad runs along the 
verge, where its course was finally stayed. It is as if from its 



124 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

boiling reservoir a tide of melted asphalt, ten feet high, had 
swept down the valley, spreading out in fan shape as it came. 
As it flowed it cooled and cracked, and tossed and surged, like 
the waves of the sea. The burning foam hardened; the furrows 
and crests of the waves took solid shape, and now it is a black, 
petrified river. Bottomless fissures cross it in every direction ; 
ragged points, as hard as iron and sharp as glass, cover the sur- 
face. For the most part it is impassable by man or beast. 
Occasionally, however, there is a long wave, smooth, rounded, 
and black, looking for all the world like a whale. Along the 
edges of the bed grew shrubs and bushes, which looked brighter 
than vegetation elsewhere. I have been told that the lava yields 
in time to the action of the elements, and that green grass grows 
where once the molten lava hissed and flamed, but of this I can- 
not speak from observation. There is nothing else in nature 
like a lava-bed, and the traveler over the Atlantic & Pacific can 
see this evidence of earth's mighty convulsions without getting 
out of the car. In fact, the lava is only a few feet distant. 

Another sight on the first division of the Atlantic & Pacific 
is the Indian village of Laguna. The pueblo is like all others — a 
series of "dobes," running tier upon tier on the slope of a bare 
rock. Many of the houses were in ruins. In former days, when 
the Pueblos were harassed by the Navajos and other wild tribes, 
they kept within their works, but now that the pressure is re- 
moved, they distribute themselves along the banks of the river 
that irrigates their little fields, and build separate habitations. 

Of course the conversation turned to a considerable extent on 
the resources of the country and the future of the road. The 
region, sterile as it looks, is yet a stock country of considerable 
value. 

The mineral resorces of Arizona are undoubtedly great; but it 
seems to me that the great value of the Atlantic & Pacific lies in 
its possession of the wonderful pass through or over the Conti- 
nental Divide and its consequently easy grades. It will be the 
through freight line, if my judgment in such matters is worth 
anything. 

The tourist will travel this road in after years because it does 



OUT ON THE ATLANTIC & PACIFIC. 125 

traverse in its course a desert. The desert has its attractiveness; 
it exercises an indescribable but powerful charm. Thousands 
have felt it, and the desolate waste will forever woo men to its 
burning breast. In a short time the road will be within easy 
staging or horseback distance of the Grand Canon of Colorado, 
a wonder in its way, like Niagara. Men tired of trim parks and 
placid lakes, and vapid watering-places, will find in these un- 
tamable wilds something to stir the blood and linger in the heart. 



HOMEWARD BOUND. 



No matter how carefully we plan a journey beforehand, or 
how methodically we measure in advance its days, there comes a 
time when it may be said to end itself; when we cease to look 
forward and begin to look back over the route we have come; 
when we think not of the land whither we are going, but of the 
land from whence we came. The traveler, when this period 
comes, in spite of himself, had better, if he can, go home. Fur- 
ther journeying is a weariness, a twice-told tale. 

After returning from the visit to the Canon Diablo, and the 
confines of Arizona, the writer felt that he was "homeward 
bound," and the little that remains to be told is the hurried rec- 
ord of a journey often filled, it must be confessed, with thoughts 
that had nothing to do with present surroundings, and oft-times 
completely obliterating them. 

From Albuquerque to Santa Fe is, to the readers of these 
letters, old ground. The return journey was performed entirely 
by daylight. It was breakfast instead of supper at Wallace; it 
was noon instead of evening at Santa Fe, but nothing of inci- 
dent befel. Santa Fe was found even quieter than it had been 
left, for Governor Sheldon had gone to the southern part of the 
Territory and taken his good stories with him. The stage for 
Espanola did not start till next morning, and there was a long 
half-day to lounge about the plaza and sit under the portal of 
the Governor's palace, and talk to the old man Ellison and Mr. 
O'Neil, of the old Santa Fe. The ghost of what the "regulars" 
call the "Old Army" walked in the talk of these elderly gen- 
tlemen. It was curious to hear them speak of captains and 
lieutenants of whom I had never heard, except as generals. 
One of these vanished martial figures was Bernard E. Bee. He 
was killed, a Confederate general, at the first Bull Run. He 

(126) 



HOMEWARD BOUND. 127 

was the greatest military dandy, they said, that Santa Fe had 
ever known ; more precise even than Sykes, our General Sykes, 
who died in harness in 1881. 

The Espanola stage drove around to the Exchange at 7 o'clock 
in the morning. It was full of men, young fellows who had 
been mining and prospecting in various regions, and were going 
over to the San Juan country to try their luck. They carried 
guns and wore miners' garments ; hence it was, it is presumed, 
that a drummer with plaid clothes, and a big stomach like a 
sample trunk, surveying the party from the steps of the Palace 
Hotel (terms $4 a day, charged to the "house,") said he 
" wouldn't ride with that crowd," and remained over to the next 
stage. Nevertheless I found the men very fair company; close 
observers of all they had seen, and acute in their judgments of 
men and events. One of the men gave the most graphic ac- 
count I ever heard of the great railroad riot at Pittsburgh. 

The twenty-two miles of stage-road between Santa Fe and 
Espanola is what John Bunyan would have called "doleful." It 
is sand and rock, piled up in ridges, endwise, crosswise, perpen- 
dicularly, every way — a rolling, pitching desert. There were 
water and trees at a few places where they change horses, but it 
is desolation for the most part The consolation of the traveler 
is "looking to the mountains from whence cometh help." The 
great range which ruus from Santa Fe to Taos looks down on it 
all, and gives a sense of protection. 

But one town is passed on this road, the village of Santa Cruz, 
on a little river of the name, which rushes cold and swift from 
the mountains to join the Rio Grande. The largest building is 
the old church; the largest residence is that of the priest; and 
the only people at work in Santa Cruz were some men engaged 
in building an adobe wall around the priest's garden. 

At last we reached the Rio Grande, yellow and swift; crossed 
it on a low wooden bridge, and so came to Espanola, the southern 
terminus of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. 

I doubt if there is in the confines of New Mexico a more se- 
cluded spot than Espanola, even though it has a railroad. The 
narrow-gauge appears to have kept along down the Rio Grande 



128 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

till it reached this lonely spot, and then said "There is no more. 
Here we stop." Had it gone on to Santa Fe, a real goal would 
have been reached. As it is, the southern division of the Rio 
Grande, from Antonita down, reminds one of a fishing-line with- 
out any hook. 

The banks of the Rio Grande above and below Espanola are 
occupied by Indian villages, and the Indians who lounged about 
the depot were the most cleanly and refined-looking .Pueblos I 
had seen. They wore bright scarlet blankets, marked "U. S.," 
the first evidence I had noticed of any beneficence of the Govern- 
ment. On the train, which stole quietly out of Espanola, after din- 
ner, was the first comely Indian woman I had ever seen during an 
acquaintance — by sight — with Indians, beginning with the Sacs 
aud Foxes when they lived in Iowa. While her features were 
purely Indian, there was that expression which, wherever we see 
it, we call womanly, and which it is difficult to further define. 
She was neatly dressed in the same masculine fashion peculiar to 
the women of the Pueblos, and was modest and quiet in her de- 
meanor, without the sullen, stupid look common to the features 
of semi-civilized people when in repose. Her appearance sug- 
gested a train of thought in conversation with an intelligent gen- 
tleman of Taos, who for the time was my fellow-traveler. He 
had seen much of Indians during his long residence in New Mex- 
ico ; had served against the Navajos in the New-Mexican regi- 
ments raised by Gen. Carleton, and had original views respecting 
Indians, as indeed he seemed to have on all subjects. 

Taking the Pueblo woman as a text, he said that the position 
of women among Indians is not generally understood. The In- 
dian woman among the wild people is in appearance a slave, per- 
forming all sorts of drudgery. In reality she has a better brain 
than the male Indian, who is a weak animal. The squaws 
must bear the brunt of the campaigns, and Indians rarely go to 
war against their counsel. It is the women who invent and fre- 
quently execute the hellish cruelties inflicted upon captives, in 
revenge for the killing of some relative of an influential squaw. 
Neither are Indians incapable of the " tender passion." Indian 
songs, like the songs of civilized people, are not only of war, 



HOMEWARD BOUND. 129 

but of love. The Apache "buck" constructs himself a sort of 
flute out of a gun-barrel, and by a series of diabolical noises 
on this instrument he strives to express the sentiments which agi- 
tate his copper-colored bosom. Could some agency, my inform- 
ant thought, be brought to bear upon the Indian women, they 
could persuade the men to live in peace. But under the Indian 
rule wives are a matter of purchase, and most horse-stealing and 
plundering raids are undertaken by young men to supply them- 
selves with the wherewithal to set up house-keeping. Thus it is 
seen that love not only rules "the camp, the court, the field, the 
grove," but also the desert and the lava-bed, the canon and the 
mesquite thicket. 

My Taos philosopher left the train at Embudo. The car seemed 
empty without him ; in fact there was but a handful of passengers. 
When the narrow-gauge is extended to Santa Fe — a work now 
in progress — a circuit will be established and a route will be 
open for tourists. A run over the A. T. & S. F. from Atchison 
to Santa Fe, and then back to the northward over the Rio Grande, 
will be full of variety and interest. But to return to the present 
journey. 

The Rio Grande began to look like a brawling mountain creek, 
and finally was lo9t to sight, and we commenced the ascent of the 
Comanche Pass. It is up, up, I do not know how many miles, 
clinging and climbing along the side of the mountain. A goat- 
path could hardly be steeper or mire devious. We wound in 
and out, crossing deep ravines on high bridges, passing through 
cuts so narrow that you could touch the sides with your hands; 
then holding on by the mountain's side along a straight shelf for 
some distance, affording a chance to look back upon the long in- 
cline we had ascended. All around were mountains. From one 
side of the cars we looked up the straight mountain-side; from the 
other down into the perpendicular depths ; before was still the 
steep path. At every turn it seemed as if we would reach the 
place where the mesa met the sky, but there were other windings, 
and it was up and upward still. At last we grew tired — ceased 
to be expectant; the road might climb to the stars for all we 
knew or cared. But at last the hoarse breathing of the engine 



130 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

ceased. We were on the high, level mountain-top, and looking 
to the eastward we saw a great plain. Beyond rose a heavy 
range of snow-capped mountains. It was the plain of Taos, and 
the few reddish dots near the mountain's foot were the town of 
Taos. Then we lost sight of it, and were in the pine woods of a 
country that reminded me somewhat of the "glades" of the Al- 
leghanies. There is not a town on the line between Espanola and 
Antonita, only the railroad houses, the section houses being of 
hewed pine logs, painted red, reminding one somewhat of Norway. 

At Barranca we had supper, an excellent meal. It is wonder- 
ful how well travelers are fed in the most out-of-the-way places. 
The railroad is, to use an expression not altogether unknown to 
reporters, " the prince of caterers." 

Night found us on the high plains, with mountains in a con- 
tinuous chain on our right. At Antonita there was a street — 
the first we had seen since leaving Santa Fe. It was like coming 
out of a wilderness. At Antonita the road turns off to Durango 
and the San Juan country, and the Toltec gorge, and the cliff 
houses, and a world of wonders, but we had ceased looking for 
these. 

A change of cars, and we sped along under the moon. The 
conductor was obliging and instructive, and pointed out every- 
thing. Those peaks were the Costillas, and up the stream a few 
miles once stood old Fort Massachusetts, and here was the later 
Fort Garland. This high mountain, its top showing broad sheets 
of snow that glittered in the light of the white moon, was the 
Sierra Blanca, and this and that peak had never been climbed ; 
and then I wondered why we did not have an "Alpine Club" like 
the English, to do that sort of thing, and get their necks broken 
for the benefit of the newspapers. 

At two o'clock in the morning we reached Placer, where I had 
determined to stop over and cross the mountain and see the Veta 
Pass by daylight. 

The morning broke clear, and it still seemed like New Mexico, 
but by the time we had reached the summit the sky was overcast. 
It seemed as if that mountain was the dividing line between two 
climates. There were occasional bursts of sunshine as we 



HOMEWARD BOUND. 131 

climbed down the pass, but masses of fog hung on the slopes 
of the mountains like smoke from a battle-field. The pass was 
not as rugged as I had first expected, the slopes being actually- 
like New England pastures. The engineering is wonderful, but 
the originality of the thing was detracted from by noting the old 
wagon-road to Fort Garland winding along-side. We have 
reached the point that we naturally expect the locomotive to go 
wherever a mule can climb. The " mule-shoe curve " is a striking 
piece of work. At the time of its construction there was noth- 
ing like it in the country. I do not know that it has ever been 
surpassed. So down and down we went, without jar or slip, or 
more untoward motion than would occur on level ground, and 
here we were at La Veta; henceforth we were to cross no more 
mountains. 

This road- on from La Veta to Pueblo takes the mountains in 
reverse that I had seen going southwest, and I had hoped to see 
the Spanish peaks again, but a dull bank of clouds settled half- 
way down the mountain-slope and hid all from view; there was 
nothing except the green plains and streams running bank-full 
from recent rains; all was cool and green and damp. One might 
as well have been in Liverpool. 

The next day was passed in Pueblo; full of new brick blocks 
and bustle and Kansas fellows, and not only white Kansans but 
black ones. In every town in my travels I was accosted by some 
colored brother whom I had known in Kansas; and they were 
among the most active and wide-awake of the population. 

The "Old Mortality" of Pueblo is our old friend "Bona" 
Hensel, who erstwhile made the sparks fly "like chaff from a 
threshing-floor," in the blacksmith shop at Seneca, but who for 
many years has beaten the newspaper drum in Kansas and Col- 
orado. "Bona" and Mrs. Bona, who, by the way, has studied 
hard under a good master and has become an artist of celebrity,, 
are living in Pueblo, having built half a dozen towns, and risen 
and fallen with as many mining booms in Colorado. Although 
it rained miserably all day, mine ancient philosopher and friend 
went the rounds and explained how Pueblo had everything and 
more, too, and was bound to be the great city of the mountains, 



132 SOUTHWESTERN LETTERS. 

before which Denver would "pale her ineffectual fires." The 
most impressive sight in Pueblo is the steel works. Iron ore, 
coal and limestone are collected at Pueblo, and the result is first 
iron, then steel, then steel rails. If you have never seen steel 
made you should see the process at Pueblo or elsewhere. The 
molten iron is subjected to a blast in an immense holder, hung on 
bearings. If I supposed the readers of the Champion would 
understand me, I would say it was shaped like a keno urn — but 
to make the matter clear we will call it the nest of the oriole. 
From the mouth, under the strong blast, flash and fly such 
fireworks as never human pyrotechnist made. It is as if every 
wheat-head and straw from a threshing-machine was turned sep- 
erately into golden fire, yet burning so as to preserve their in- 
dividual form. When this fiery broth is cooked, the great 
converter is tipped easily on its side, the purified metal flows into 
great caldrons which run around a circular railway, and the metal 
is drawn off into moulds, whence come the blocks of steel known 
as "blooms," which are rolled into rails. There are twelve hun- 
dred swarthy men employed in these works, and their capacity is 
being doubled. 

In the wet evening as the sun was sinking, the famous " Santa 
Fe" fast train, the "Cannon Ball," drew up at the Pueblo depot, 
a crowd having gathered to see the start. In a moment we were 
off, to make the journey from the mountains to the Missouri in 
less than twenty-four hours. Half of Colorado and the length 
of Kansas to be traversed between sunsets. At the great speed 
•one would expect some jar, but so smooth is the track that none 
is perceptible, and you can only realize how fast you are going 
by seeing the telegraph poles whisk past. All night while we 
slept, the train was tearing across the plains; first one conductor 
and then another walked his rounds; the engineer and fireman 
gave place to others, and still we rushed on; over high embank- 
ments and through cuts and across bridges, and, always in peril, 
yet always safe because of watchful eyes and skillful hands and. 
hearts of oak and nerves of iron. So the train kept on its swift 
and tireless way, and not a sleeping child or timid woman woke. 
The sun set, the stars rose from and sank into the plain, and the 



HOMEWARD BOUND. 133 

day came again. With its coming I woke and looked out on a 
green prairie that stretched to the brightening sky. I did not 
know what stations we had passed, nor just where we were, but 
I saw a white school house facing the rising sun, and I knew it 
was Kansas. 

It was hundreds of miles yet to Atchison, but what of it? — it 
was Kansas all the way. Villages and towns grew more fre- 
quent ; wheat, oceans of it, showed dappled in the sun. The 
cars took on passengers at every stop ; names and faces grew fa- 
miliar; here was Larned, Hutchinson, Newton, and all. Three 
hundred miles of it, and all good. No more volcanic mountains, 
wrecked and splintered by fire; no more deserts, no more dark 
people speaking an unfamiliar tongue; no more cactus; no 
more yucca, with its fierce and bayonet-like leaves; no more 
goats, with their lagged and swarthy herdsman; no more sun- 
baked adobes ; no more mournful old churches, with their harsh 
and jangling bells; but the newest country and the best — our 
own Kansas. And so, after three thousand miles of it, this 
wandering north and south, and east and west, seeing much that 
was interesting and strange, and new and instructive to the 
writer — and it is to be hoped not wholly without interest to the 
reader — there is nothing like that place of which some old dead- 
and-gone schoolman has written in a forgotten book: 

"It is not doubted that men have a home, in that place where 
each one has established his hearth and the sum of his posses- 
sions and fortunes; whence he will not depart if nothing calls 
him away ; whence, if he has departed, he seems to be a wan- 
derer, and if he returns he ceases to wander." 



CAUTION 



The undersigned wishes to caution all who may be tempted to purchase 
and peruse a copy of this book against doing so — for the following reasons : 

1. You may be amused. 

2. You may be interested. 

3. You may be instructed. 

4. You may be moved to move to Mexico — New or Old. 

5. You may be discouraged from staying at home all your life. 

6. You may find out where to go to get richer than anybody else. 

7. You may be induced to take a ride over the Atchison, Topeka & Santa 
Fe Railroad, which equals a journey one-eighth of the distance around the 
world. 

Any one of these catastrophes would be very bad, and so the advice is 
given not to buy this book. W. F. WHITE, 

Gen. Passenger and Ticket Agent, lopeka, Kas. 



FEB 23 1905 



IBApTO 



